The winning numbers in the US Powerball jackpot. If only we could have seen into the future!

Can you imagine the life they’re going to have from now on? Absolutely you can. We’ve all dreamt of being rich. And that’s one reason we buy lottery tickets even when the odds are so terrible.

And Powerball’s odds are really, really terrible. In October last year the lottery tweaked the rules to make winning far less likely, by expanding the range of numbers a player can choose.

The odds of winning Powerball went from one in 176 million to one in 293 million. That’s tiny. For context, one person figured out you are eight times more likely to die in a car crash than win the jackpot, if you drive one mile (1.6km) to buy your ticket and back.

You might think the sneaky way of raising the jackpot would annoy Powerball customers. Instead it has caused more people to play. More. Not less.

This guy was so keen to win the US Powerball he bought himself $1000 worth of tickets. His chances of winning were still ridiculously tiny. Picture: Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press via APSource:AP

The lesson is this — we are a brilliantly rational species that has achieved incredible things in science and engineering. But we sometimes act as if we aren’t.

Humans, it turns out, can’t deal well with odds that are very small. Instead, we rely on something else — whether we can picture the outcome. If we can see it in our mind, we think it’s more likely. If we can’t picture it, we think it’s unlikely.

This is what experts call a cognitive bias.

Researchers into cognitive bias performed a simple experiment. They asked people to guess how likely two candidates were to win the next US election. Half the participants were told to visualise one candidate as President, and the other half had to visualise the other one. Each group said the person they visualised was more likely to win. This way of thinking is called “the availability heuristic”.

So, could anything be easier to imagine than winning lotto and living the life of luxury? I’ve had lots of practice at imagining it — I can easily see the ten-car garage, the huge mansion, I can even smell the chlorine as I lounge by the pool and look out over the sunset.

You may be the same, and that makes us feel the chance of winning lotto may not be too tiny.

But we’re biased, and that makes us wrong.

Pictures like this one of the winner of October’s Powerball jackpot, make us imagine it could be us up there holding the novelty cheque. Picture: Dale G. Young/The Detroit News via APSource:AP

While lottery experts rely on this bias, other experts use it to change our behaviour for good.

Those drink driving ads that show people dying horrifically in car smashes? They are a way of making the small chance of a car crash easier to imagine, and make us think rationally about driving home after a few drinks.

Anti-smoking ads that show cancers multiplying are the same. They recognise our cognitive bias and work with it to make sure we act as though the risk is real.

Some risks, though, we imagine too easily, and overestimate.

People stress about airline crashes far more than is rational, because whenever one happens, they’re on the news. The chance of dying on your flight may be one in five million but the image of an airline crash is easy to bring to mind.

Similarly with terrorist attacks. When those planes hit the World Trade Centre, the image of terror attacks killing lots of innocent people was easy to bring to mind. It didn’t matter that even in 2001, more people were killed by cirrhosis of the liver. We were, and still are, obsessed about terrorism even though the odds of dying from it are actually tiny.

When we know about cognitive biases we can improve our decisions.

Humans muck up their decision-making frequently. If we just spray our decisions round at random there is not much science can do. But if experts spot a pattern in how we miss, they can correct it. Like a tennis coach who sees the serve constantly straying out left, they can correct it a bit so you’ll be on target more often.

If you’re worried about your plane crashing, visualise a plane landing safely. That’s what happens 99.9999 per cent of the time.

And next time you’re thinking about buying a lotto ticket, visualise scrunching up your ticket in disappointment. It could save you a bunch of money.

Jason Murphy is an economist. He publishes the blog Thomas The Thinkengine. Follow him on Twitter