The world spends a remarkable $250 billion a year on lottery tickets. Yet, perplexingly, it has proved difficult for social scientists to show that lottery windfalls actually make people happier. This is the famous and still unresolved paradox due initially to Brickman and colleagues. Here we describe an underlying weakness that has affected the research area, and explain the concept of lottery-ticket bias (LT bias), which stems from unobservable lottery spending. We then collect new data—in the world’s most intense lottery-playing nation, Singapore—on the amount that people spend on lottery tickets (n = 5626). We demonstrate that, once we correct for LT bias, a lottery windfall is predictive of a substantial improvement in happiness and well-being.

中文翻译：

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快乐彩票中奖者和彩票偏见

全世界每年在彩票上的花费高达 2500 亿美元。然而，令人困惑的是，事实证明，社会科学家很难证明彩票意外之财确实让人更快乐。这是最初由 Brickman 及其同事提出的著名且仍未解决的悖论。在这里，我们描述了一个影响研究领域的潜在弱点，并解释了彩票偏差（LT 偏差）的概念，它源于不可观察的彩票支出。然后，我们收集了新数据——在世界上最激烈的彩票游戏国家新加坡——人们在彩票上的花费 ( n  = 5626)。我们证明，一旦我们纠正了 LT 偏差，彩票意外收获可以预测幸福感和幸福感的显着改善。