~snip~
That's true to a large degree - apparently the majority of adults in the UK play some sort of lottery games despite very low odds of winning. Most people may not be familiar with the concept of EV, but they'd still care if EV was high enough, i.e. a lot of people would not be interested in taking a $1 bet when they could win $1 million, but the odds of winning were 1:10 million, but probably everyone (maybe except religious Muslims) would take it if the odds were 1:10 (not that it'll ever happen). So the higher the EV, the more they care.
The thing is that we humans are not great dealing with probabilities in our minds, so the casinos and other gambling companies simply use this fact in their favor.
It's not natural to think about probabilities, we are just not good at it. On the other hand for example we are great at thinking in terms of Newtonian physics, we don't need to calculate an equation to know how to throw a rock for example, yet we can think perfectly well how to do it. For probabilities you actually have to calculate the math behind it.