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Mini: Why We Lottery · Why We Do What We Do

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  You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome to Why we do
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  what we do? Mini. I'm your host Abraham, and I'm your host
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  Shane. We're going to talk about money stuff. How you do it,
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  what you do it? Oh my gosh, why we do it? So
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  much money stuff? Yeah, so much money stuff today, but more like
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  a gambling type money stuff, but a state sanctioned, government sanctioned gambling with
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  the states type government like money stuff. Yeah, do you ever do you
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  ever do this thing? I don't actually think I've ever done the lottery.
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  Living in a state that has legalized gambling ubiquitously, I have definitely done quite
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  a bit of gambling, but I have not I don't think I've done the
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  lottery specifically, although I used to buy those scratcher tickets when I lived in
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  states that did not have legalized gambling. Yeah, scratch that itch. Yeah
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  that makes sense. The state of Florida is like very like the lottery is
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  a big deal here and it's always been a big deal. So and we'll
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  talk about that. But yeah, it's so we're basically talking about the lottery
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  today. Yeah, and why people do lotteries and not the book The lottery
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  which involves stoning somebody to death or the story the short story, right,
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  I'm not familiar with this one, but that sounds lovely. Yeah, it's
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  a whole thing. The prize that you get stoned to death at the end
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  is like a sacrifice for the town. Like Hunger Games, but for but
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  scary even less reason. Maybe yeah, the Hunger Games, but with more
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  rocks. All right, So let's talk about what the lottery is. The
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  lottery is a means of raising money by selling numbered tickets and giving prizes to
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  the holders of numbers drawn at random. That's pretty much it. That's really
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  one it is. So the basic process is this. You go in,
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  you select a set of numbers. Many people do the same thing in that
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  in that context. You do this because there is a prize that you can
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  win. Someone selects a random number or a series of numbers from a pool
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  of numbers, and if your number or numbers match what are selected, you
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  get paid lots and lots and lots of money and or prizes, but mostly
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  money. So people put in just a little bit of money. They can
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  put out essentially as much as they want, which can be zero and just
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  not get a lottery ticket, and they're hoping to get some kind of return
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  on the investment. So you put in a little bit of money, there's
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  the chance of the gigantic gigantic prize. And so in the United States,
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  the money that people put in generates ninety eight billion dollars in revenue, with
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  roughly sixty five percent of that money going back to winners of said lotteries,
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  and the rest, of course, means that there's roughly thirty four billion dollars
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  generated by lotteries that gets kept by the state. Honestly, I thought it
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  would be more. I'm actually surprised it's not as much. I thought it
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  was, like, way less than I was. I was surprised by how
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  little they bring in. Yeah, I think, honestly, it does kind
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  of make sense if you think about just like all the various revenue streams that
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  there are that exist for sort of a government. Yeah, in my mind,
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  but you're right, I also would have thought that number would have been
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  a little higher given the kinds of money that they throw around. Yeah.
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  Now, if you've ever been part of a raffle, then that's kind of
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  a form of a lottery, Like you get a ticket they call number at
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  random and you get whatever cash prize. Again, but specifically we're talking about
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  this idea of like using funds from the people as like a government process to
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  help fund certain projects and stuff like that. So like basically, you are
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  citizen, you pay to get into this lottery, You're gonna get some prize
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  as a result of it. But the rest of the money that doesn't go
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  to you, as the cash prize, is going to go to funding some
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  project or some kind of service. Now, this is something I did not
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  know is where this originated. But as with most things, it seems the
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  first known lottery to take place occurred in the Chinese Han dynasty between two five
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  and one eighty seven BCE. And as I said with most things, what
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  I just mean is it seems to have originated in China, and they used
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  these Keino slips, which was the original lottery that might have been used to
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  help fund projects such as the Great Wall of China. Yeah, in that
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  wild the Great Wall of China was like partially funded by government lotteries. This
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  wall brought to you by lottery. Uh so there's an ancestor of yours in
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  that wall. Yeah, Any enormous amounts of like a worker abuse in slavery
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  too. Not a great not a great wall when you really think about it.
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  But the Kino slip, so just to kind of go back to that,
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  quino slip is a sheet that you would use to select numbers for your
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  lottery ticket. It looks like a long kind of like almost like a like
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  a scantron if you're familiar with those, where there's like multiple lines and multiple
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  numbers on it, and you circle or color in the numbers that you would
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  like to select for that lottery. And keno. The word keno comes from
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  friends or Latin roots from the specific word kini or q u i n i,
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  meaning five each. So modern lotteries are used to fund projects and community
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  needs. For instance, in Florida, the lottery helps put money back into
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  public schools and debt services so that they can send in exterminators to help get
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  rid of all those pesky books and learnings. Uh huh. They don't like
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  words. No, they don't like words. They like education. There maybe
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  guns is what that's paying for in schools. Unclear. Now I don't know
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  for Florida, Texas for sure. Okay, but Florida's weird. I think
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  knives I think there's more knives here than anything. Got it, got it
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  knives. Ok. It's a strange place. And apparently lotteries can even help
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  pay for college. Yeah, so I actually got When I was in high
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  school, I got a it's something called a Bright Future Scholarship, and the
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  Bright Future Scholarship is mostly funded by the lottery. Oh nice. See,
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  when I was in high school, I got a scholarship for college that was
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  called I think the Millennial Scholarship, but that was largely funded by tobacco companies.
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  Oh. Interesting. It's weird how these like kind of harmful programs could
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  put people through college. Yeah, speaking of harmful programs, here's an ad.
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  All right, So we want to know how can you win the lottery?
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  And like, why haven't you won the lottery yet? Because if you
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  have, you're probably not listening to this podcast, And if you're listening to
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  this podcast, you probably haven't the lottery except for the podcast Lottery congratulations by
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  finding us. Yep, yep, you're welcome. We are. We are
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  a real prize. But this is because the odds of you winning the lottery
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  are slim dismal. Even you are more likely to have several of the following
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  experiences. Let's go ahead list these off and turn taking fashion. Yeah,
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  you are more likely to die from an asteroid strike, which is Boker's and
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  that is one in seventy four million, eight hundred and seventeen thousand, four
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  hundred and fourteen. So just to kind of give you an idea, one
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  in seventy five million, and you have more of a chance of that than
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  the lottery. You have more of a chance of becoming a movie star,
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  which is arguably more lucrative depending on how much of a star you are,
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  and that's a one and one million, five hundred and five thousand chants.
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  Yeah, you're more likely to get struck by lightning, which is a one
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  in one point one million chance. You are more likely to bowl a three
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  hundred game, which arguably is a lot of skill, but even then there's
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  some amount of luck involved. And that's a one in eleven thousand, five
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  hundred chance, right, And so winning the lottery in a pool of six
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  where you have six numbers, that's like from you have a one in thirteen
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  million, nine hundred and eighty three thy, eight hundred and sixteen chance,
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  So about one and fourteen million chance out of a six number lottery. However,
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  if it's a pool of seven numbers, your chances grow exponential, like
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  they are like way slimmer. It goes to tune of one in five hundred
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  and three billion. Yes, that's a lot, I mean not a lot,
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  arguably, depending on how you're thinking about the odds are like you're not
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  You're just not going to get it. Yeah, yeah, you're not gonna
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  get it. And then it gets worse when you get into like when the
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  when the prize grows and more people participate, Yeah, you're even less likely.
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  Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Now, there's actually something fun that
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  that's not really it's beyond the scope of this conversation to talk about, but
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  there's sort of there's something called the lottery logical fallacy that has to do with
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  the fact that, like the odds of it happening to one person, as
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  we said, are astronomically small, the odds of it happening to someone are
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  nearly one hundred percent, Like it's almost guarantee that it's going to hit,
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  that it's going to happen to you is very odd, and I think people
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  have a hard time wrapping their minds around that sort of paradox, right,
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  but it is sort of how things work. So anyway, just food for
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  thought on there. Yeah, but you might be asking yourself, why is
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  this psychology podcast talking about the lottery? Have you guys completely lost it?
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  Have you run out of ideas? No, we actually do have a reason
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  for this. Yeah, it's actually pretty cool. So why do people do
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  the lottery? You may be thinking, why do it? Because it would
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  be cool to get a chance to win this and whatever, But the risk,
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  when you think about it, is actually fairly low. A lot of
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  ticket can cost anywhere between one and twenty bucks, depending on how much you
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  want to put into it. Most lottery tickets, when you're just selecting a
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  couple of numbers, is a dollar. The more you spend, the more
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  chances you get. Obviously it's not a huge loss, but the reward is
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  actually pretty great when you think about it. Overall, I spend a dollar
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  and I have a chance of becoming a billionaire. That's actually like a pretty
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  good kind of trade off. Yeah, exactly, it's real. It's low
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  risk, it's high reward. It's a very small commitment to make financially.
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  Yeah, in some instances, partial matches will pay out as well. So
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  even if you didn't get a complete match, you might get a partial payout
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  match. So you might not win the big bundle, but you might win
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  a few hundred bucks. And that's for you spend a dollar, maybe even
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  as much as twenty dollars and you match three numbers or like, let's just
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  say you spent that dollar. That's not too shabby. Spend a dollar,
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  get two, two or three hundred dollars. That's a huge return on investment
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  percentage was yeah, absolutely, like and that makes sense. So like,
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  if you win every now and again, you're gonna you're gonna keep going back
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  to it. Now. Some scientists also describe something called a rescue fantasy,
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  and essentially what this is is the idea that you participate because if I can
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  get rich, I can get out of the situation. I'm gonna get out
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  of town. I'm gonna I just need this like nest egg, I need
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  this thing to go. And people think that's that's a big part of the
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  engagement with that too. So you might actually see that there is a relatively
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  if there is a higher amount of financial pressure on someone, they actually might
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  be more likely to risk their dollar in this investment than someone who doesn't even
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  need the money as much. So as you said, it's because the promise
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  of a potential reward is so great that it's worth the small financial commitment for
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  many people who are desperately looking for something right now. The other thing to
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  consider here is that a lot of this lottery ticket buying that people do,
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  they do it ritually, like the every week or even potentially every day or
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  every month they go in, and so this pattern of behavior gets rewarded in
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  its basic consistent interactions of just going through the motions of buying a ticket,
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  and the ticket itself might start to become a sort of its own reward for
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  some. But there's also like some other social things that go along with this.
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  Let's say you are buying your lottery ticket from a gas station, which
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  probably most people are. You might know the clerk, you might sort of
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  go and pick up your favorite snack or your favorite drink when you're there.
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  There's some anticipation to seeing when the names are getting called. There's sort of
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  a little bit of fun game element to it that's sort of challenging. So
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  there's just like a ton of other smaller little rewards that are built into the
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  system that starts to it just maintains that habit. It maintains the behavior even
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  when people aren't winning. There's a lot of little rewards that sort of continue
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  to pull it along and keep it going. Right. And also too,
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  because the reward is so great, like it's almost still worth putting the risk
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  up because again the risk is so low, right like, so like there's
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  all these little things that contribute to it now exactly. Another thing too to
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  think about is that as the payout increases, so to entries. I kind
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  of mentioned this earlier, but what this does is the more is the payout
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  increases, you are going to have less chance because more people are going to
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  enter, which means that there are more names in the pot, which means
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  that there are it's less likely that you are going to be able to win
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  in this. So it would be cool to win a lot of money,
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  you're actually less likely to win as the pool gets bigger, and you're more
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  likely to win early on. So when you play at the very beginning,
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  when it's like, you know, twenty four million or something like that,
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  right at the beginning, you're more likely to win at that stage than you
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  would as more people enter the lottery, So it's not actually that the probability
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  of winning changes with how many people are playing, because like, whatever numbers
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  you pick are the numbers you pick if it was just you plane versus a
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  billion other people playing, Like, there's not actually a difference in whether or
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  not those are your winning numbers, right, The chance of you winning based
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  on the numbers you select. The probability who's selecting the winning numbers doesn't change
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  depending on how many people play. It's essentially like you have the same chances
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  whether it's ten people to play over one hundred people to play, because you're
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  still having to select those numbers. The problem is is that you have less
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  of a chance of winning that full jackpot because the more people that get involved,
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  the more chances there are that somebody will also select the same numbers that
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  you select because you have more people in the pool. So that's the way
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  that I would see that as something like that. Yeah, it does make
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  sense now, as we've sort of already said, the lottery is a form
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  of gambling, so or sort of bringing it all back around to this,
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  and this is a behavior that gets rewarded at random at variable times, and
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  we get often just enough for Ward to keep that that habit going, keep
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  the behavior happening. There is a mountain of research on gambling that's probably a
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  whole episode worth discussing by itself. Yeah, possibly several, because there's how
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  it forms. There's rehabilitation programs and various behavioral interventions that have been developed.
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  So gambling is a thing in its own right. But as we said,
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  this is relatively low stakes gambling, but it is still a form of gambling
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  because again, you're wagering some amount of money toward an outcome, and then
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  you're waiting, like by taking some action in this case selecting numbers and then
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  seeing do those numbers then result in a big payout? Absolutely. Now,
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  in relation to the lottery, there are a couple interesting things I found as
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  we're kind of going through this. First, the largest lottery payout was two
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  point zero four billion dollars and that took place in November of twenty twenty two
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  in California. Nice just for all you gambling addicts out there. The most
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  drawn number in the lottery is thirty eight wild Eighteen movies have been funded by
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  lotteries, including The King's Speech and Billy Elliott. What I did not know
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  that at all. That's crazy me neither. It's so crazy. US lotteries
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  have created thirty seven hundred millionaires since nineteen ninety four, which is a wildly
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  large amount that makes this seem very plausible. Yeah, yeah, one hundred
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  percent. And alternatives like scratch cards like you mentioned before, scratchers are you
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  know, the thing that we talk about, or keino. They exist as
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  ways to engage in simple gambling without playing the actual lottery. So there are
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  like other ways to kind of participate in lottery processes without actually participating in the
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  lottery. Yeah. So I think that's pretty much what we have to say
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  about lotteries, though, as we said, it's sort of a relatively low
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  stakes thing. But I would strongly caution you to not invest a lot in
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  this because the odds of this meaning anything to you are basically none. If
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  you can afford to and you want to have fun, obviously, what I
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  would do is treat it as fun, Like, treat this as like an
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  activity in sort of like a low stakes gamble where you're going to lose.
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  Basically, like ninety nine point ninety nine percent is not high enough of a
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  guarantee to say you're gonna lose. You're like, not quite one hundred percent,
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  but so close it may as well be one hundred percent, right,
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  exactly. If you want to have fun, you want to you have some
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  like extra cash to spend, Sure, go do it, but just don't
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  get your hopes up. Maybe just imagine it as like an investment in that
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  you get to play a short little game and the money that you spend on
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  it is going to help fund something powered by the state, or maybe a
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  movie or something like that. Yeah, exactly, I think it's a good
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  way to look at it. Perfect Well, then I think we have probably
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  run this long enough. Do you have anything else before we close out?
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  Nothing else? All? Right, then this mini is out. CIA you've
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  been listening to Why We Do What We Do. You can learn more about
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  this and other episodes by going to WWDWWD podcast dot com. Thanks for listening,
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  and we hope you have an awesome day.