People demanded more money for a lottery ticket they picked than one just handed to them

Ellen Langer found that people who chose their own lottery number demanded far more money to sell their ticket back than people who were simply handed a random number. The odds of winning were identical either way, but choosing the number created a false sense of influence over a purely random outcome. Langer called this the illusion of control.

— Ellen J. Langer, The Illusion of Control — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975