CURRENT ISSUE

SUBSCRIBE

ABOUT CALIFORNIA WILD

CONTACT US

ADVERTISING

SEARCH

BACK ISSUES

CONTRIBUTORS'
GUIDELINES

THIS WEEK IN
CALIFORNIA WILD

COUNTERPOINTS

The Science of Luck

Jerold M. Lowenstein

Luck is a mysterious quality and the degree to which people believe in it has profound personal, political, and financial outcomes. Charms, amulets, and talismans abound in virtually all civilizations ancient and modern, testifying to the long history of the human effort to control chance by magical and symbolic means. Luck was considered a gift of the gods, to be doled out or withheld at their whim. Nowadays, despite the well-known statistical laws governing flips of the coin, throws of the dice, or the odds on a number at roulette, most gamblers still believe these odds can be overcome by having Lady Luck on your side.

In our everyday experience it can seem that some people “have all the luck” and others are jinxed. The lucky manage to be in the right place at the right time, meet the right people, and go from one success to another. According to an old Yiddish saying, if an unlucky man sold umbrellas, it would stop raining. A friend I encounter from time to time invariably recites a litany of unmitigated disasters in his professional and personal life—job loss, betrayal by a trusted pal or lover, unusual illnesses and accidents.

What accounts for the unequal distribution of life’s blessings and curses?

Richard Wiseman, a professional magician and psychologist in London, has carried out the first scientific study of this question and reports the results in his book The Luck Factor (Hyperion 2003). At one of his magic shows a woman told him she had been lucky all her life. He asked the audience if there were others who considered themselves unusually lucky or unlucky, and many hands went up. This piqued his scientific curiosity, and he proceeded to study the fortunes of a large number of people.

He started by asking randomly chosen shoppers in central London whether they had been lucky or unlucky in several different areas of their lives: careers, relationships, home life, health, and financial matters. Fifty percent considered themselves lucky, 16 percent unlucky. Those lucky or unlucky in one area were likely to report the same in other areas. Most experienced either good or bad fortune with amazing consistency. Wiseman concluded luck could not simply be the outcome of chance events.

For example, Wiseman describes Lee’s lucky streak, which began at age 16 when he was working on a farm. He was sitting on the back of a stationary tractor connected to a large automated plow. A friend decided to take the tractor for a short trip but didn’t realize he was pushing Lee forward onto the moving spikes of the plow, which would have ripped him to shreds. As Lee started to fall into the plow, the stainless steel link between the tractor and the plow suddenly sheared, and he was flung backwards to safety. Later, while reluctantly helping his father with a difficult job, he met the woman of his dreams and they have been happily married for 25 years. He is the successful marketing manager of an educational toys chain, and has won lots of awards and promotions.

Unlucky Susan’s life, on the other hand, has been a series of catastrophes: multiple broken bones, unhappy relationships with men (the church where she was to be married burned down two days before the ceremony), and once she had eight car accidents in a journey of 50 miles. “Not many people want to get in a car with me,” she reports, “and if I go to someone’s house, I am told to sit there and not move.”

Do some people have a magical ability to win without trying? Wiseman the skeptical magician tested this proposition. He had 700 of his subjects bet in the United Kingdom National Lottery. When asked, the lucky were twice as confident of winning as the unlucky. Only 36 actually won any money, and these were evenly split between lucky and unlucky people. On average, everyone lost about 2.5 pounds sterling. Being lucky does not help with games of chance like lotteries, slot machines, and roulette. It doesn’t change the laws of probability.

Wiseman carried out another experiment. He asked lucky Martin and unlucky Brenda to come to a coffee shop at different times and wait there until a researcher met them. A crisp five-pound note was placed on the pavement directly outside the shop, which contained only four tables with a stooge at each table, one of them a successful businessman. Hidden cameras recorded the course of events. Martin arrived first, picked up the five-pound note, sat down next to the businessman and offered to buy him coffee. The man accepted and the two of them chatted away.

After Martin left, a second five-pound note was planted. Brenda walked right over the note into the shop, ordered coffee, and sat down next to the businessman but didn’t speak to him. Later, Martin and Brenda were asked if anything lucky or unlucky had happened that day. Martin described how he found the money and met an interesting person. Brenda looked blank and had nothing to report.

Being in the right place at the right time is actually about being in the right state of mind. It can all be summed up in one word—personality. The lucky use body language and facial expressions that other people find attractive. They smile twice as much as the unlucky and engage in more eye contact. They tend to have a broad network of friends and take advantage of favorable opportunities.

Though they can’t beat the odds at the lottery, lucky people expect good fortune. They see misfortune as being short-lived and shrug it off. Unlucky people think anything good that happens will soon give way to their usual dose of disaster. Self-fulfilling prophecies affect lives. Those who expect to fail may not even try. The lucky try to achieve their goals even when the odds seem slim. The unlucky are more superstitious and twice as likely to believe that black cats, breaking a mirror, and the number 13 are bad omens.

Wiseman concludes that luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods. It is a mind-set, a way of perceiving and dealing with life.

Although intrigued by Wiseman’s observations, I was disappointed that the professional psychologist didn’t dig more deeply into the psyches of his subjects and give us some insight into the formative events that turned some into cheery champs and others into pathetic also-rans. Instead, Wiseman takes the simplistic self-help tack that you too can triumph if you follow the four-step program followed by the lucky. He ignores the folk wisdom that there are compulsive losers as well as determined winners.

The quintessential believers in luck are gamblers, and gambling is almost universal among humans. In his book Paradoxes of Gambling Behavior (Hove 1988), Willem A. Wagenaar explores the question of why people gamble when gambling is essentially a no-win situation. He found that players are so wedded to their belief in luck they may even refuse to improve their odds. In the game of blackjack, for instance, there is a well-known optimal strategy for not losing. But in order to win over the long run, a gambler must count the cards that have been played and calculate whether there are more high or low cards left in the deck. More high cards favor the player, so he should increase his bets; more low cards favor the house, so he should decrease his bets. As described in Bringing Down the House (Simon & Schuster, 2002), by Ben Mezrich, a group of students from MIT took advantage of this strategy to win millions at Vegas until they were barred from the casinos. Yet compulsive gamblers won’t use it, thus giving the house an even bigger advantage than the 1 to 16 percent it already enjoys.

Habitual gamblers are mostly superstitious and possess a variety of erroneous beliefs, for instance, that other players can influence their luck in the game. They reject the math of probability and chance with credos like “this is my lucky day,” “my luck has to change,” or “this number has to win.” In Niagara Falls, casino operators complained that slot machine players preferred to urinate into the plastic coin cups or onto the floor rather than leave a machine they were convinced would soon disgorge a jackpot.

Belief in luck has vast political and financial ramifications too. Until 1980 Nevada was the only state in the union where gambling was legal. Today, virtually every state has a lottery, and casinos are springing up like toadstools on scores of Indian reservations. Robert Goodman, in The Luck Business: The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America’s Gambling Explosion (Martin Kessler Books, 1995), describes the “McGambling” and “Las Vegasing” of America. He sees legalized gambling as a desperate search for a magic bullet to cure ailing state economies. But this bullet ends up killing more than it cures.

Las Vegas prospers because it is built in the desert of a sparsely populated state. People come from other states, leave their money at the casinos, shows, restaurants, and hotels, and then go home. In most other states, the gamblers live in the area, and if what they spend in the casinos is subtracted from what they would have spent in theatres and restaurants, it leaves little or no net gain for local economies.

To the contrary, the states are paying an increasingly heavy price for the rising epidemic of problem gambling. More and more addicted gamblers spend all the family savings and assets, max out their credit cards, borrow from relatives and friends, go into bankruptcy, and in desperation may write bad checks, embezzle, and steal, winding up on welfare or in jail.

In 1995, University of Nevada and Georgia Southern University researchers conducted an economic impact study of Wisconsin’s 17 tribal casinos. They estimated that when the costs of compulsive gambling—such as increased welfare, lost work productivity, embezzlement, and other criminal activities—were considered, the casinos cost the state between $318 million and $493 million per year.

The California lottery was adopted on the promise it would finance public education, but California’s schools, formerly the best in the nation, now rank close to the worst. Many politicians no longer feel that education is their responsibility (they refused to raise taxes for education in the recently-passed California budget); revenues from the lottery are supposed to take care of it.

Lotteries are a regressive voluntary tax paid by those who can least afford it. Motivated by what Goodman calls “the pathology of hope,” the poor fork over a much larger fraction of their income on the lottery than the rich. Historically the poor of many nations have fought revolutions over unfair taxes, but legalized gambling is a tax they are willing and eager to pay.

No one can deny the element of chance in human existence. One person may inherit millions, while his neighbor may be struck by lightning. But Wiseman’s research shows that the chance factor is only a minor component in determining who is lucky and who unlucky. Life, it seems, is like the game of Scrabble—14 percent of your chance of winning or losing depends on the tiles you draw, 86 percent on the skill with which you play them. Paradoxically, Lady Luck’s most ardent devotees are the ones least likely to be rewarded with her favors.