Unexpected but Incidental Positive Outcomes Predict Real-World Gambling
作者研究了意外但非相关的积极结果（如本地体育队表现超预期、晴天出现在连阴天后）是否会促使人们更多参与赌博。利用纽约市彩票赌博的大数据集和基于计算奖励学习模型的统计方法，作者发现当环境中的偶然事件结果好于预期时，人们赌博金额增加。这种效应在纽约市各社会经济阶层普遍存在，且仅对本地体育和天气事件显著。研究提示，意外积极结果可能通过影响情绪或乐观偏差，进而影响风险行为。
Positive mood can affect a person's tendency to gamble, possibly because positive mood fosters unrealistic optimism. At the same time, unexpected positive outcomes, often called prediction errors, influence mood. However, a linkage between positive prediction errors-the difference between expected and obtained outcomes-and consequent risk taking has yet to be demonstrated. Using a large data set of New York City lottery gambling and a model inspired by computational accounts of reward learning, we found that people gamble more when incidental outcomes in the environment (e.g., local sporting events and sunshine) are better than expected. When local sports teams performed better than expected, or a sunny day followed a streak of cloudy days, residents gambled more. The observed relationship between prediction errors and gambling was ubiquitous across the city's socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods and was specific to sports and weather events occurring locally in New York City. Our results suggest that unexpected but incidental positive outcomes influence risk taking.