Why We Keep Playing the Lottery

January 13, 2016

I have a favorite story about the lottery, which I’ve shared before… but with the jackpot going over one billion dollars, it seems a story worth retelling.

Liz knows her math. She got her Master’s Degree in Applied Statistics in 2009. She works at DePaul, and deals with student retention data.

A few years ago, circa 2011, there was a similar frenzy happening with the lottery as there is now. The jackpot got really big, and everyone was buying tickets. The people at my office were pooling money together, looking to improve their odds by buying tickets as a group.

At home, I was talking with Liz about the lottery and told her what was happening at my work place. I asked her if something similar was going on at DePaul. Were people doing an office lottery pool where she worked?

Keep in mind that Liz is a statistician. And all of her coworkers handled data and numbers in some way, all day long.

After a brief pause, she tilted her head and looked at me. And said “WHY would we do that?”

Took me a little while to understand her response. The odds to win are just terrible. Statisticians understand this, but regular people… well, I think it’s harder for us to grasp just how truly bad the odds are.

In Adam Piore’s article Why We Keep Playing the Lottery, there are some really great observations as to why we continue to throw money at something that seems so impossible to win.

In addition to outlining the work done by Rebecca Paul Hargrove to popularize the lottery, the article also examines our motivations for buying tickets, for wanting to play a seemingly un-winnable game:

[…] fantasizing about winning the lottery activates the same parts of our brains that would be activated if we actually won, notes Daniel Levine, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington, and an expert on decision theory and neural networks. Picturing ourselves in a limo activates visual areas of the brain, while imagining the clink of champagne glasses lights up the auditory cortex.

During the latest lottery excitement, I’ve been able to hold off buying tickets. I never really carry cash on me, and the idea of waiting in line to buy tickets seemed cumbersome.

When the office pool came up again, I didn’t seek it out (again, I didn’t have money on me). But then I heard you could buy tickets online.

Up until tonight, I held off. And around 8PM, I decided I’d break down and spend $10 on tickets. Why not, I thought?

Except that there was some issue with buying tickets online using Chase Visa cards. So even though I gave in, I couldn’t actually get tickets.

Oh well, so it goes. Perhaps it was the universe’s way of looking out for me. And in the long run, though I didn’t win a billion dollars… I can think of it as me not losing $10.

Maybe I could use that money and buy some scratch-off tickets, instead.

[Illustration by Ellen Seinstein]

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