By RNZ The lure of big lottery jackpots is due to people being poor at assessing probabilities, says a psychology professor. Dr Marc Wilson of Victoria University told RNZ’s Sunday Morning the increased ticket sales Lotto NZ reported ahead of Saturday night’s $50 million Powerball draw were a common finding across the world. “We tend to see that there’s a proportional increase in the number of tickets sold when there’s a rollover jackpot.
” This was because research had shown even regular lottery players tend to have a poor sense of the probabilities of winning, he said. Even those who did understand the probabilities often discounted them, “in part because numbers that large are things that we’re not particularly well-evolved to deal with”. Research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - which led to the former being awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 - had shown people were “much more likely to go for a single massive prize” than the possibility or sure likelihood of a smaller one, Wilson said.
“What we know is that people tend to be biased more towards absolutely large numbers than higher probabilities of winning smaller ones.” For regular lottery players, the money they had spent on tickets in the past could also lead to them overestimating the likelihood they would win. “If we’re regular lottery players we have a sunk cost, so we’ve played this every week for however many years [and] we’ve spent an awful lot of m.