Powerball drawing scheduled for Saturday night. The jackpot is estimated at $600 million
The odds of winning are 1-in 175.2 million, according to Powerball
One reason is that everybody else is buying tickets, say experts.
Six numbers can be used to alter your life.
Maybe your kid is sick and there are hospital bills to pay. Maybe you’ve lost your job and you’re worried about making rent. Maybe you still have an occupation however it’s not the best, and you’d love to enjoy the next 50 years relaxing on the beach with a Mai Tai in your hand.
Whatever the situation whatever your situation, the current expected 파워볼사이트 winnings of $1.5 billion can help. That’s why we are left wondering about playing the lottery, can we all just a bunch of damsels in distress?
“People enjoy having the fantasy of rescuing someone else,” human behavior expert Dr. Wendy Walsh told CNN in 2011, after her Mega Millions jackpot hit $656 million. “We are all possessed by the Cinderella complex – there’s a fairy godmother to come in and save us.”
We’ve all heard the numbers. The odds of being the winner of the Powerball jackpot is 1. 175.2 million. You’re more likely to die from a bee sting (one in 6.1 million) or to get injured with lightning (one in 3 million) or be born with conjoined twins (one in 100,000).
But people keep playing – most likely because the thought of winning is more exciting than the idea of being attacked by sharks (one one in 11.5 million).
“It doesn’t bother them because they’re in love with optimism,” Walsh said.
In the fiscal year 2012, U.S. lottery sales were $78 billion, in accordance with the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. Over half of us have taken part in the lottery over the past year, however, 20% of customers buy the majority of tickets.
A big part of the appeal is that everyone else has done it, said Dr. Stephen Goldbart, author of “Affluence Intelligence” and co-director of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute.
In a Psychology Today article titled “Lottery-itis!” Goldbart noted two major reasons people purchase tickets.
“Jumping onto the bandwagon is an age-old motivator of psychological conduct,” wrote Goldbart and his coworker, Joan DiFuria. “We desire to be part of the crowd, to be “part of the action,’ not ‘feel left out.’ “
The other reason comes from an underlying sense of powerlessness caused by change, whether it’s a changing economy or a shifting world.
“The path to an American Dream has been radically altered,” they wrote. “(The lottery) allows you to believe in the magic of winning: that you will be the one who paid little and got a lot as well as the odds to win.”
Spend a few dollars, and you can get many – this is the starting point for every good investment. The cheap cost of the lottery ticket is one of the most appealing aspects about it.
This industry frequently criticised for being a tax that is unfair to those who are poor. The average household that have less than $12,000 a year spend 5percent of their earnings on lotteries, as per Wired.
The year 2008 was the time when researchers from Carnegie Mellon University attempted to understand why the poor tend to be more likely to buy lottery tickets.
The study, published in Journal of Behavioral Decision Making The study suggested that players focus on the ratio of cost-to-benefit for a single ticket rather than taking into account the overall cost of playing over the course of a year or for a life time.
Participants in the study were each given one dollar at a time, and asked if they wanted to spend every dollar on tickets to the lottery, author George Loewenstein said. Some were presented with $5. They were then asked to choose how the number of tickets they’d like to buy with the money. Members of a third group were told they could either spend $5 on lottery tickets or not buy any at all.
The second group bought half as many as those offered $1 each. In the scenario of all or nothing 87% of people in the study purchased no tickets. The results of the study were in line with what’s known as”the “peanuts effect.”
“There are a few dollars that are small enough that they are almost ignored by the public,” Loewenstein said Wednesday.
“It almost doesn’t feel real. The penny slot machines and the lottery are the optimal place for risk-taking. They’re extremely cheap, inexpensive to play, but there’s an enormous chance of winning.”
Still, to say that playing the lottery is a bad idea doesn’t make sense to the professor of economics and psychology.
“It’s absurd to think the 51% portion of the population is self-destructive, irrational, or just uninformed,” he said. “It plays a psychological role for individuals. … Our joy of living isn’t just dependent on the current circumstances however, it could also be based on our future. We can envision what our situation could become.”
Irrational or not millions of people will be glued to their TV and computer screens and hope that the numbers they’re clutching will come up.
They’re confident that the fairytale finale they’ve waited for is coming even if it requires some magic.