Why Do People Play the Lottery? The Psychology of Hope

Ask someone who plays Lotto Max every week what their odds are, and most will tell you the truth: basically zero. They buy the ticket anyway. That’s the part the usual explanation misses. So why do people play the lottery when they already know the math? Not because they can’t count. Decades of behavioural research point to something more specific: our minds treat a very small probability as bigger than it is, and four other effects bring people back week after week. One popular explanation you’ll read everywhere turns out to have almost nothing behind it.

Why do people play the lottery?

People play the lottery because a tiny chance at a life-changing prize feels much larger than it is, and because a $6 ticket comes with a few days of picturing a different life. Knowing the odds switches neither effect off. Five measurable psychological effects do most of the work.

None of these is a character flaw. They’re ordinary features of how people decide things under uncertainty, and lottery design leans on every one of them.

Do lottery players actually misunderstand the odds?

Mostly, no. Some players do misjudge the odds, and that’s a documented bias in its own right, but it isn’t what carries the behaviour. The better-supported explanation is probability weighting: people know a small probability is small, then act as though it’s larger. Prospect theory, the model of risk that won Daniel Kahneman the Nobel prize in economics, builds this in from the start. It treats the behaviour as a normal part of how people decide, not as an arithmetic error.

The size of the gap is easy to miss. In one experiment, people said a 5% chance of winning $100 was worth about $10 to them. Its actual expected value is $5. The same people priced a 90% chance at $100 at roughly $63, well under the $90 it’s worth. Nicholas Barberis walks through both results in his review of prospect theory (opens in a new tab) for the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Small odds get inflated. Near-certainties get marked down.

Barberis also points to the neatest evidence for it: the same person often buys both lottery tickets and insurance. One is a bet on an unlikely gain, the other a guard against an unlikely loss, and standard economics has trouble explaining why anyone would want both. Overweighting rare outcomes explains the pair at once.

Two honest caveats. The effect is well documented when the odds are printed in front of you, which is exactly the lottery’s situation. When people learn a probability from repeated experience instead of a stated number, they tend to underweight rare events. And probability weighting isn’t the only account on offer. Plain entertainment value competes with it, and researchers still argue about the underlying cause.

Why do people insist on picking their own numbers?

Because choosing makes a game of pure chance feel a bit like a game of skill. Ellen Langer named this the illusion of control in 1975, after a study still quoted 50 years later. Office workers were sold $1 lottery tickets. Some chose their own, some were handed one at random. Asked later what they’d sell the ticket back for, the choosers wanted an average of $8.67. The people who’d been handed a ticket wanted $1.96.

Identical odds. More than four times the price, purely because they’d picked it themselves.

The modern reading is more careful. In a 2022 review in Addiction, Luke Clark at UBC and Michael Wohl at Carleton (opens in a new tab) argue that choosing doesn’t create the belief so much as amplify one the player already holds. Someone picking family birthdays, or avoiding 1-2-3-4-5-6 because a run “can’t” come up, brought that belief to the counter with them.

That leads somewhere genuinely useful. Players don’t pick numbers randomly, a habit economists have called conscious selection since Cook and Clotfelter described it in 1993. Birthdays crowd everything from 1 to 31, and dates, patterns and shapes traced on the slip crowd the rest. Since a jackpot is shared among everyone who matched it, a popular combination pays out less when it finally lands. Picking your own numbers doesn’t change your chance of winning. It changes what you’d take home if you did.

Why does almost winning feel so good?

Two matching symbols and a third that lands one row off is a loss. Your brain doesn’t fully treat it as one. In a 2009 study in Neuron, Luke Clark and colleagues (opens in a new tab) scanned players during a gambling task and found that near misses recruited the same reward circuitry as real wins, with nothing actually won. Participants rated those near misses as less pleasant than clear losses, and they still came away wanting to play more. The effect was strongest when the player had chosen the gamble themselves.

Scratch tickets are built around this, and so is the moment you match four of seven numbers and check the ticket twice. Canada’s Responsible Gambling Council (opens in a new tab) lists the everyday version of it, “I almost won, so I must be due”, among the most common gambling myths. It’s a myth because a draw has no memory of last week.

Why is it so hard to skip a week?

Because once you have “your” numbers, sitting out becomes a decision you might regret. Researchers call it anticipated regret, and there’s a lottery study built squarely on it. In 2002, Sandy Wolfson and Pam Briggs surveyed 485 people in England the week before a new midweek National Lottery draw launched. The players most likely to buy into that new draw were the ones already playing the same set of numbers every Saturday, and what drove them was the unbearable thought of those numbers coming up on a week they’d sat out. The paper’s title puts it plainly: Locked Into Gambling (opens in a new tab).

It’s why the office pool is awkward to leave, and why someone will keep the same six numbers for 20 years. A random pick costs nothing to skip. Your numbers do.

What about the idea that news coverage makes us overestimate our odds?

You’ll read this everywhere. Jackpot winners are all over the news, losers are invisible, so the availability heuristic makes a win feel common. It’s a tidy story, it appears on nearly every article about lottery psychology, and it’s close to absent from the peer-reviewed literature on why people play. Rogers’ 1998 review of lottery cognition, still the canonical one, doesn’t list availability among the biases, and the major recent surveys don’t either. Treat it as a plausible illustration that nobody has actually demonstrated.

Where media coverage clearly does reach players is in the numbers they pick, and the best study on that makes the point better than the myth does. Availability on its own predicts that after March 2020, when nobody could escape the phrase “COVID-19”, the number 19 should have been picked more often. Patrick Roger and co-authors checked it against Belgian National Lottery data (opens in a new tab) and found the reverse: 19 was played significantly less. In a survey of 500 Belgians, prompting people to think about COVID pushed their preference for 19 down further still, most of all among those who described themselves as superstitious. The coverage did reach them. It just carried a sour association, so they moved away from the number rather than towards it.

One trap if you go reading further: in gambling research, “availability” usually means how physically easy a venue is to reach, not the Tversky and Kahneman heuristic. A paper using the word may be about something else entirely.

So is playing the lottery irrational?

As entertainment, no. Six dollars for a few days of daydreaming is a purchase like a movie ticket, and that’s how most of the roughly half of Canadian adults who buy a ticket each year treat it. Nobody needs a lecture about it.

The trouble starts when a ticket stops being entertainment and starts being a plan. Canadians spend close to $10 billion a year on lottery tickets, and the spending isn’t spread evenly: lower-income households put a larger share of what they earn into it than wealthier ones, a pattern that has held across decades of research in several countries. When the draw becomes the retirement plan, the five effects above stop being harmless quirks. If playing has stopped feeling like a choice, there’s free provincial help everywhere in Canada, and we’ve collected the apps and self-exclusion tools Canadians use.

How Lodavo fits in

The pull of a draw doesn’t actually depend on losing money, and there’s academic support for that. In the same review that explains probability weighting, Barberis notes that savings accounts which enter depositors into a draw “have proven popular, particularly among low-income individuals”. Keep the draw, take out the cost, and people save.

That’s what Lodavo does. You save in the Canadian bank account you already have, and the more you save the more free tickets you earn for a weekly draw, with a chance to win up to $10,000 and a guaranteed prize of at least $100 going to a user every week. You still pick your seven numbers. One is still revealed each night. The part that changes is the ending: your savings never leave your own bank, so when the draw is done you have every dollar you started with, plus whatever you added this week.

If that raises the obvious question, we answer it properly in our explainer on whether prize-linked savings counts as gambling. For the wider picture, including how the model has worked in the UK and the US, start with our guide to prize-linked savings in Canada.

Nobody plays the lottery because they failed a math test. People play because a small chance feels big, because chosen numbers feel like theirs, because almost winning feels like nearly winning, and because skipping a week feels like tempting fate. Every one of those is a reasonable thing for a human mind to do. They just happen to cost money every single week.

Want the draw without the ticket price? Download Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab) and earn your first tickets by saving this week.

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.