to grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old Florida widow, to have won the $590 million Powerball lotteryin May, Robert Williams, a professor of health sciences at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, offers this scenario: head down to your local convenience store, slap $2 on the counter, andfill out a six-numbered Powerball ticket. It will take you about 10 seconds. To get your chance of winning down to a coin toss, or50 percent, you will need to spend 12 hours a day, every day, filling out tickets for the next 55 years. Itt register. t able tograsp 1 in 175 million,Itwe have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.s still the case. About 57 percent of Americans reported buying tickets in the last 12 months, according to a recent Gallup study. And for the 2012 fiscal year, U.S. lottery sales totaled about $78 billion, according to the North American Association ofState and Provincial Lotteries. It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, youhave to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set ofrules frames a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale. And nobody knows how to sell hope and dreams better than Rebecca Paul Hargrove. On most days in a nondescript office park on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee, you will find Hargrove reclining in a purpleexecutive chair behind a massive desk. She occupies a corner office in the Tennessee Education State Lottery Corporation, whereshe serves as president. Hargrove is a lottery legend. In the 1980s and s leadership, Florida was outselling every other lottery in the nation, including California, which had a population twice Florida Now I know how the Boston Red Sox fans felt. Babe Ruth has been traded to the Yankees. the premier lottery executive in the country.s second floor corner office. She greeted me warmly, dressed in a pink T-shirt, khaki pants, and a button-down sweater. With a massof snowy white hair swept back in a loose bun, and a pair of glasses perched precariously on the bridge of her nose, Hargrovecame across as a folksy Fairy Godmother, with a gift for schmooze. Within minutes of my arrival, she was spinning out anecdotes about her hairdressers a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale. Hargrove has an intuitive understanding of what drives her customers to play the game. She has a preternatural sense of where their psychological buttons are located and how to push them. She responded in a flash to my comment about the logical futility of playing the lottery. d play a different game, Its entertainment. For a very small amount of money you might change your life. For $2 you can spend the day dreaming about what you would do with half a billion dollars In 1985, when Illinois Governor James Thompson tapped Hargrove tohead the state lottery, she didn I played the lotto when I was caught up in the frenzy of a $40 million jackpot, And I thought, What made me play was the thought of what I would do with $40 million. You pay $1 and then for three days you can think about that question. Would I share with my brother-in-law? No! I dons nephew. How to Get from Washington Boulevard to Easy Street, The more the jackpot is, the more tickets you sell, It feeds the dreaming. If you play a lot and you play for three years and you never win, you Hargrove said. In Illinois, Hargrove experimented with smaller prizes, which hadbetter odds of winning than the big state Lottos. When she introduced a second weekly Lotto drawing, she saw an immediate 5 percent spike in sales. To prevent player burnout, Hargrove pioneered games with different prices, designs, and themes. She might trot a game where you scratch off cute cats for cat lovers, and a game with footballs for Bears fans. She might sell four leaf clovers on St. Patrick fresh exciting bubble gum.s children, and that was something that should always be apparent. The directlink to education it affects how the legislators feel, it affects how the playing public feels about it, it affects how the press feels about you, All those things add up to a positive experience buying a lottery ticket.s feel-good marketing goes a long way toward explaining why we keep playing the lottery, scientists areincreasingly making it clear how lottery marketing taps into our brains and impacts our communities. Selling the lottery dream is possible because, paradoxically, theprobabilities of winning are so infinitesimal they become irrelevant. Our brains didnt have offered much of an advantage. Anintuitive and coarse method of categorization, such as t happen, happen sometimes, happens most of time, always happens, Most of the weird stuff that you see with decsion-making and risk happens with small probabilities, t know what to do, I don To make the choice, your brain automatically looks for suggestions, searches for more information, and if there is little information, we can make strange associations, assume something is realistic, even if it is superstitious. The motivational areas of the brain can be heavily influenced by vivid daydreaming, Just like seeing something can activate the emotional system, so can envisioning it. a point Hargrove grasped from the start. Research has shown that positive reinforcement is a key in virtually all of the successful lotteries, notes the University of Lethbridge the near miss,t realize, however, that is an illusion. The odds of winning get worse with each successive match. Another important factor comes into play as we step up to the cash register at the convenience store: self-image. Lottery sales, it turns out, are heavily influenced by the way we are thinking about the purchase, and the way we perceive ourselves inrelation to others when we do. Carnegie Mellons possible to change how many lottery tickets people will buy by making them think about their purchase in a larger context. The researchers gave one group of study participants $1 at a time, five times, and asked them if they wanted to buy a lottery ticket.