Locked into gambling: anticipatory regret as a motivator for playing the National Lottery.
Four hundred and eighty-five people were asked about their intentions to play the National Lottery in England a week prior to the introduction of a new midweek draw. We predicted that those people who played the Saturday game with a regular set of numbers would be more inclined to play the new midweek game than those who had not established a routine of using the same set of numbers. We further predicted that their motivation to play would derive from a feeling of 'anticipatory regret'--a sense that they would find it intolerable to discover their regular numbers had been drawn when they hadn't purchased a ticket. Results supported both of these predictions, and an interpretation of the data is given in terms of the circumstances most likely to trigger such counterfactual reasoning.
Wolfson
Sandy
S
Division of Psychology, University of Northumbria, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. s.wolfson@unn.ac.uk
Briggs
Pam
P
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D005715:Gambling / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation; D013850:Thinking; D013997:Time Factors