Like some two million other New Zealanders, I bought a ticket for the $50 million Lotto rollover jackpot on June 9. In truth, I buy a ticket only when it’s one of these big-attention jackpots. Why is that? And why do people buy lottery tickets anyway? Surely because winning means happiness?
It’s not quite the same question, but in 1978, in what’s become probably the most cited paper on lotteries and psychology, Philip Brickman asked, “Is happiness relative?” by looking at two groups of polar opposites –luck-wise, that is.
Brickman and colleagues compared the happiness of just over 20 lottery winners with two comparison groups: a control group and a group of people paralysed in accidents.
This study laid the groundwork for a finding that has come to define lottery psychology research, and also happiness research: lottery winners weren’t noticeably happier than controls in terms of their recollection of how happy they used to be, how happy they were at the time of the research or in anticipating their future happiness.
Accident victims, however, did report differences in happiness. Specifically, they reported less here-and-now happiness and, though they didn’t differ from controls or lottery winners in their anticipated happiness, they showed a bias towards reporting being significantly happier in their past.
Importantly, lottery winners tend to find less happiness in “mundane”, or everyday, pleasures. Paraplegics, the researchers argue, experience less present happiness because of the comparison with their biased recollection of past happiness.
The more recent science of happiness has an explanation for why literally hitting the jackpot doesn’t mean long-term happiness. Turns out about half of the variation in a person’s in-the-moment happiness is genetic – we each have a happiness setting that we tend to return to, regardless of the good or bad that’s happened during our day.
About one-tenth of the lemon meringue pie of happiness comes from what’s happened to us, and that means that once the warm glow of a win has worn off you swing back down to your default setting. The remainder is about how you think about your life – whether you accentuate the positive or ruminate on the negative.
More recent research has questioned what has come to be seen as received wisdom in lottery studies. After all, an awful lot of research says that if there is a relationship between how much money we have and how happy we are, it’s a positive one. Why the paradox?
Let’s look to Singapore. It has some of the world’s most enthusiastic lottery players – spending a staggering NZ$2000 annually on lotteries per person, a 2017 study found. The biggest-spending 10% cough up more than $10,000 each.
If I was unsuccessfully spending more than 10 grand a year on Lotto, I’d probably be a bit unhappy, and that’s what the research shows – a Singaporean’s life satisfaction is lower the more they spend on tickets.
But, of course, the more lottery tickets you buy, the greater your chance of winning a prize. Although that chance is still ridiculously small, it does mean winners are more likely to be people who more regularly buy tickets.
If you don’t take into account the literally sunk cost a person has in past lottery-ticket purchasing (and the unhappiness that goes with it) you find the standard result: lottery winners are no happier than anyone else. But, if you take that past cost into account, people who win are happier, and the magnitude of that effect is greater for wins higher than 10 grand.
But the effect is still small. Or so I tell myself as I screw up that ticket …
