The rich and the poor, who likes to buy lottery tickets more?
Maybe you think that the rich have a good budget and are more willing to spend a small amount of money to buy a few lottery tickets; while the poor are strapped for money and can't wait to spend a dollar in half, rather than spending it casually. However, the opposite is true. The poorer people are, the more they like to buy lottery tickets.
Economists have long observed this phenomenon: the less money you have, or the greater your losses, the more likely you are to take greater risks. Economists Kahneman and Tversky have previously proposed a study of "end of day utility" that found that more people bet on the worst horse in the last horse race of the day. On the likely winning horse. At the end of the day, gamblers who lose red-eyes will rush to flip the book at the last chance, so they will tend to bet on the odds with the highest odds (the least likely to win).
We call this all-or-nothing behavior "lottery thinking", which is also a "poor man's thinking" caused by lack of resources. They think saving money is a waste of time, and they don't have enough money anyway, so they just buy lottery tickets and gamble. So these people will sacrifice their precious real money to buy lottery tickets in exchange for emotional hope.
People's fascination with buying lottery tickets stems from a special mechanism in our brains, that is, the taste of making money is really good, and the fantasy of making money feels even better. There is a special biological machine in our brains that accelerates the operation of profit expectations more than actual profits. The more we are short of money, the stronger our expectations and desires become.
This phenomenon doesn't just happen when buying lottery tickets. When we watch sports, we find a similar phenomenon, when the lagging team is nearing the end of the game, football players will frequently shoot long distances from the goal; basketball players will go to the final whistle before the final whistle. , near-desperate shot at half-court; rugby players will throw "big luck" passes in the final moments of the game. That is to say, the more a team sees a loss, the more they will seek a comeback miracle like a lottery ticket.
This kind of "lottery thinking" may be an instinct of human beings. Biologists have found that when animals lack food, water and shelter, they create a "negative energy budget" that makes it impossible for animals to seek steady subsistence gains. In fact, what they need is a lottery-style "get rich." Therefore, animals in a desperate situation are more inclined to changeable harvests. Although this increases the risk of getting nothing, it is also the most feasible way to replenish the energy that is about to be depleted.
Biologist Thomas Kelleck once conducted an experiment in which he faced the yellow-eyed juniper finch with two choices: a plate with a fixed number of corn kernels; or a plate with possibly double the amount of corn. Grains, or maybe none at all. Birds who have just finished eating are more likely to choose the "OK" option, while hungry birds will not hesitate to fly to the plate where the corn kernels are uncertain.
The same is true of human evolution. When survival was at stake, our ancestors were only able to survive if they were willing to take greater risks. For example, when food was in short supply, early humans might have chosen the riskier hunting of large and ferocious animals, either to obtain sufficient food or to die from the beasts’ mouths, and conservatively choose a compromise method such as gathering wild fruits, and Its survival cannot be guaranteed.
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