The chance that you will win the jackpot in the New Year’s Eve draw is extremely small, but every year millions of people buy a ticket. Why do we do that? And what exactly are those chances? “It’s almost absurd that we do it again and again.”
Imagine: you have a list in front of you with all home addresses in the Netherlands. You place your finger randomly on that list and choose a house. Suppose someone else then drives to exactly that address purely on a gamble, without you having said which house it is.
It’s almost impossible, the chance of that happening is so small. But the chance that you will win the lottery is about the same, Kees Keizer explains. He is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen and specializes in human behavior. “It is almost absurd that we participate again and again, because the chance is so very small,” he says.
It is not yet possible to say exactly how likely you are to win the New Year’s Eve draw this year, because we do not yet know how many people will buy a ticket. In previous years there were approximately 7.5 million each time. 1 in 7.5 million is a 0.00000013 chance.
There’s a good chance that such a number doesn’t mean much to you. “That is exactly the problem,” says Keizer. “People are bad at estimating very small numbers. Better said: at imagining something. That is why it is better to make it concrete, such as with the example of randomly stopping at a house.”
“Suppose you can stop working. You can imagine that.”
People much prefer to use their imagination as an indicator of how likely something is, says Keizer. The easier it is for you to visualize something, the greater the chance that it will actually happen.
“When you buy a lottery ticket, you start thinking about what you are going to do with the prize. Suppose you see that nice new car driving into your street. Suppose you can stop working. You can imagine that.”
You also buy the anticipation, because you can think about it all month long. At the same time, you can also present yourself socially. “For example, you can say to the children: ‘If we win, you get this.’ Or say that you are going to give something to charity. Then you come across well.”
“The grand prize gives the excitement of another life.”
Add to this that the New Year’s Eve draw has an element of tradition. New year, new opportunities, is often thought. And maybe you recognize the moment on New Year’s Eve after twelve o’clock when everyone checks their phone to see if they have won something. Real tradition.
“I don’t know exactly what happens with lotteries, but it also works with offers that if something is unique, you buy it faster,” says Keizer. “If you missed it, your chance is gone. If there were another New Year’s Eve draw in January, fewer people would probably buy a ticket now.”
So the anticipation is fun, but the end result is (very) often not real. Yet it is part of us. “A top prize is often much more motivating than the odds. If the jackpot were 2,000 euros, you can fantasize a lot less than if the jackpot is millions of euros. While you would have a better chance if two thousand people could win 2,000 euros than one person would win 4 million.”
We care about the tension. And the excitement of a jackpot is not easily found in other things, such as going on a roller coaster. “The main prize gives the excitement of another life,” says Keizer. “That’s really something different.”