Lottery is a game where participants purchase a ticket to win a prize. The prize money is determined by the number of tickets sold. The first recorded lottery games were held in the Low Countries in the 15th century to raise funds for town fortifications and help poor people.

A study conducted in the early 1980s found that lottery play correlates with a range of negative behaviors. For example, individuals with an addiction to the game may engage in compulsive behavior that jeopardizes their financial stability, health, or relationships with family and friends. Fortunately, there are many effective treatment methods that can support you or a loved one in breaking the habit of playing Lottery.

The popularity of Lottery increased in the 1980s, fueled by widening economic inequality, newfound materialism that asserted that anyone could become rich, and anti-tax movements that led lawmakers to seek alternative sources of revenue. Lottery games are an attractive source of revenue because they are easy to organize, cheap to run, and widely popular.

Leaf Van Boven, chair of CU Boulder’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, explains that there are a variety of psychological motivations that lead people to play Lottery. For example, people often overestimate how likely it is that they will win. They also tend to “overweight” small probabilities—in other words, they treat a 1% chance as if it were much higher than it really is. The combination of these factors makes it difficult to resist the temptation to play.