Sixty years ago this week, New Hampshire became the first state to allow a government-run lottery after a ban that lasted until the mid-1800s. Lottery plays are now common in most states and raise billions of dollars every year. Many people play to win, and a few are lucky enough to take home big prizes. But what drives people to keep playing despite the odds? Leaf Van Boven, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of psychology, sheds light on the psychological motivations that drive people to gamble.

In Van Boven’s opinion, the most obvious reason to play is the positive emotions that people experience when imagining winning. However, there are other psychological motivations at play as well. A major one is the tendency to minimize personal responsibility for negative outcomes by attributing them to bad luck. Another is a phenomenon known as counterfactual thoughts, in which people imagine what might have happened had they made a different choice. These can also affect lottery players, and lead them to believe that a future outcome will be different than it would have been without their intervention.

People who play the lottery are also motivated by a desire to avoid regret, especially when they experience a negative outcome. This can be due to the influence of social and cultural pressures, as well as a natural tendency to feel guilty about certain actions. In fact, the urge to avoid regret can be so strong that some people will continue to play even after losing several times. In this way, they will rationalize their behavior by claiming that it was simply not their fault that they lost, and that they were just unlucky.

The lottery is so popular in the United States that it was one of the few consumer products whose spending held steady or even increased during the recent recession. It’s important to remember, though, that the odds of winning are very low. And if you do happen to win, the payouts are typically much lower than advertised. The best strategy is to choose annuity payments, which can be invested and compounded over time to bring you closer to the advertised winnings.

The history of the lottery goes back centuries, with the practice being used to distribute property and slaves in ancient Egypt, and for entertainment at dinner parties during the Roman Empire. In the 15th century, a number of towns in the Low Countries started lotteries to raise money for town fortifications and help the poor. Lotteries were banned in most American colonies until the 1960s, when New Hampshire began offering them to raise funds for education and other public services. Since then, they’ve spread to 45 states, and generate hundreds of millions of dollars each year. This revenue helps the economy, as it allows governments to increase spending on important services without raising taxes. But the lottery has a dark side as well: people who win often lose, and sometimes at a shocking rate.