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Have you won the Lottery?

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The amazing fact about lotto is that many people that play it have some kind of intuitive understanding and know that their chances of winning are very thin and that they are probably not going to hit the jackpot. So, the big question is, if winning auto lotto processor is very unlikely, why is playing the lotto so popular? If people know something is very unlikely to occur, and it costs them to see if it will, why would they do it? Some of the reasons are rooted in psychology. Some of them are listed below:

Lateral thinking.

You hear and read stories about lottery winners all the time. Jackpot winners always make the news, but the battlers who have been playing for 20 years without winning are relegated to obscurity. Based on this, it’s at least reasonable to think “jackpotting” can’t be that rare. The net effect is that winning seems possible. For example, you can probably think of news stories about when a mountain climber fell. One reason is this kind of a story is sensational and will likely be highly reported. You might be tempted to conclude mountain climbers fall often more than they actually do.

Next time syndrome!

There is this feeling of almost there, almost winning. It feels as if the next one will be a win.The near-miss effect describes a very special kind of failure to reach a goal. The player making the attempt comes close to, but falls just short of, hitting their goal.

Lottery players who come close to winning interpret it to mean tha they will win next time if only they can try harder and so they keep playing. A research in 2009 discovered that near misses activate the same reward systems in the brain as actual successes.

Big numbers.

Gambling studies professor Robert Williams suggests that human beings don’t really understand big numbers although we have evolved some appreciation for them. We deal with amounts like six, 24 and 120 all the time, but throughout history it’s never really been important to measure out 18 million of something, or count 50 million of something else. Odds of one in 200 million don’t seem that different to odds of, say, one in 3 million. In both cases success is really unlikely. Give someone a choice between odds of one in three and one in 200, however, and the difference is really obvious. It’s certainly not that people can’t grasp really big numbers, but that they don’t have much meaning until we stop and think about them.