The psychology of lottery gambling

Abstract

This paper examines the major factors in the psychology of lottery gambling (including instant scratchcard lotteries and video lottery terminals) and argues that success is due to a number of simple and inter‐related factors. Part of the popularity of lotteries is that they offer a low cost chance of winning a very large jackpot prize, i.e. without the huge jackpot very few people would play. However, there are other important maintenance factors including: (i) successful advertising and television coverage; (ii) a general ignorance of probability theory; (iii) entrapment; (iv) manufacturing credibility; and (v) use of heuristics (e.g. illusion of control, flexible attributions, hindsight bias, availability bias, representativeness bias). The paper also argues that some types of lottery game (i.e. instant scratchcards and video lottery terminals) can stimulate excessive and problematic Play.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 100 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.