Sports wins, sunshine lead to more gambling.

• Position: Your Life - Brief article

The fact that your favorite sports team unexpectedly won yesterday will not improve your chances of winning the lottery--but it might increase the likelihood that you will buy a ticket, a team of New York University neuroscientists has found. "Our study reveals how positive, but incidental unexpected outcomes, like sports and weather, can predict day-to-day lottery gambling," says lead researcher Ross Otto, who found that, the more unexpected the sports teams' wins were, the more residents spent on lottery purchases the next day. Similarly, the more unexpected sunshine there was, the more people gambled that day.

We found that large prediction errors resulting from sports or sunshine could shift daily purchase rates up or down by up to 0.5%, and these effects were largely homogeneous across both the city's wealthier and poorer neighborhoods," the researchers explain in their paper.

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