Why do many lottery winners continue to work?

Amongst the latest entries are references to research in social and organisational psychology on “work investment”, the subjective investment in the value of work by individuals across different age and socio-economic groups. This followed an indication by Philosophy Masters student Grace Sasagi, who provided an initial list of valuable quotes. Following Grace’s indication, more references have been added to empirical findings on the shifts in the commitment to work across socio-economic groups and across different cultures, particularly the publications by Peter Warr and Itzhak Hapaz.

In empirical studies of the psychological centrality of work, one area of research concerns lottery winners, assessing whether winning high sums of money is a motive for quitting work. Here is a revealing quote from a 2004 article by Arvey, Harpaz and Liao:

Our findings indicated that the average amount won among those who chose to continue working was relatively high ($2.59 million), suggesting a relatively high monetary threshold for discontinuing work, and even among these high winners, a sizable number still continued working. For instance, a 64-year-old bus driver who won $20 million dollars stated (in the open-ended section of the questionnaire) that the “lottery is just a bonus that came my way, it has not or will not affect my work habits and goals in life. (p 415-6)

Or from Vecchio (1980):

one report concerns several London factory workers who won substantial sums of money from football pools. With wise investment, the sums of their individual winnings would have provided sufficient income for these men to live comfortably for the remainder of their lives. Yet each of the men returned to work after a brief vacation. Perhaps even more amazing in these cases is the fact that these men held jobs that could be reasonably described as dull, routine, and repetitive” (p. 362)

These individual examples of strong commitment to work need to be tempered by the shifts noted by the psychologists across decades, as well as variations across groups and within groups, correlated to factors internal and extraneous to work (family situations, relations with colleagues, professional status, level of pay, and so on). Nonetheless, these two examples above are representative of a broad section of populations in many countries identified by psychologists, who demonstrated strong commitments to work even though they no longer had any financial reason to stay in their job.