Many people play the Lottery every week, and it contributes billions of dollars to society. For some, playing the lottery is a way to pass time or have fun, but for others, it’s their only hope of changing their financial circumstances and improving their lives. Regardless of whether you’re playing for the big prize or just hoping to change your luck, it’s important to understand how the lottery works so that you can make better decisions about how and when to play.
Despite the astronomical odds against winning, the Lottery continues to be a popular form of entertainment and a means of raising money for charity. The first state-sponsored Lottery was in New Hampshire in 1964, but private lotteries were commonplace in colonial America, including Benjamin Franklin’s attempt to raise funds for cannons during the American Revolution and Thomas Jefferson’s unsuccessful effort to establish a public lottery to alleviate his crushing debts. Leaf Van Boven, a CU Boulder psychology professor who has studied decision making and counterfactual thinking, offers some insight into why Americans continue to play the Lottery.
Van Boven and his colleagues have found that when making choices, people tend to treat small probabilities as if they are larger than they really are. This behavioral response is known as decision weight, and it contributes to people overestimating the odds of winning the Lottery. Moreover, when people do lose, they often minimize their responsibility for the negative outcome by attributing it to bad luck rather than to a decision that they made.