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Cognitive Biases in Playing the Lottery: Estimating the Odds and Choosing the Numbers
Author(s) -
Holtgraves Thomas,
Skeel James
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1992.tb00935.x
Subject(s) - lottery , representativeness heuristic , odds , heuristics , psychology , preference , social psychology , event (particle physics) , heuristic , anchoring , cognition , cognitive bias , cognitive psychology , statistics , computer science , mathematics , artificial intelligence , logistic regression , physics , quantum mechanics , operating system , neuroscience
Three experiments were conducted to examine the operation of the representativeness and anchoring and adjustment heuristics in lottery play. Subjects in Experiments 1 and 2 indicated their chances of winning a lottery with an objective probability of 1 in 10. Consistent with the anchoring and adjustment heuristic, subjects (in both experiments) perceived their chances of winning to be greater when the lottery was based on a single event than when it was based on a disjunctive event. Subjects in these two experiments also selected numbers to play in a pick‐3 (Experiment 1) or pick‐4 (Experiment 2) lottery. Consistent with the representativeness heuristic, subjects in Experiment 2 demonstrated a preference for numbers without repeating digits. This also occurred in Experiment 3 wherein the numbers actually played in the Indiana daily Pick‐3 lottery were examined.