8 years ago
4
Why We Keep Playing the Lottery - Issue 4: The Unlikely
To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old Florida widow, to have won the $590 million Powerball lottery in May, Robert Williams, a professor of health sciences at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, offers this scenario: head down to your local convenience store, slap $2 on the counter, and fill out a six-numbered Powerball ticket. It will take you about 10 seconds. To get your chance of winning down to a coin toss...
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It honestly blows my mind when people can't comprehend why the lottery. I don't think I know a single person whose bought a ticket sure it was the winner. You buy it cause that little hope brightens up your day and allows you fantasize. Yet still, people will try to tout their "intellectual" superiority because they they think that everybody buying tickets are just idiots who don't understand statistic, while ironically not understanding what actually brings people back to buy another ticket.
Fear of missing out?
I think that may be a small driver, but I've never seen a person (not ironically) say "Aww, somebody won, I should've bought a ticket so I could've won."
I never have played because I feel I have as much a chance of winning as getting struck by lightning twice in the same day.