Scientific study: The Key to GOOD LUCK

Teresa Iafolla (nautil.us); Jen B. (DMI), Ashley Wells (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

UC Berkeley has a center for science and the Greater Good (greatergood.berkeley.edu)

 
Luck can seem synonymous with "randomness." To call someone lucky is usually to deny the relevance of their hard work or talent.

As Professor of Public Understanding of Psychology Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, puts it:

Lucky people “appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of lucky breaks.”

 

What do these people have that the rest of us don’t? It turns out “ability” is the key word here.

Beyond their level of privilege or the circumstances they were born into, the luckiest people may have a specific set of skills that bring chance opportunities their way. Somehow, they’ve learned ways to turn life’s odds in their favor.

 

Demystifying this luck skillset has been a personal project of Christine Carter, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Demystifying the luck skillset has been a project of Christine Carter, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center, at UC Berkeley (Zoltán Vörös/flickr.com)

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A few years ago she was putting together an online course for families on raising happier kids. She translates research findings on qualities such as gratitude, mindfulness, and happiness into quantifiable, teachable skills.

Amidst her work she stumbled upon a funny little concept that seemed to be entangled with all these things -- LUCK.

“On the academic side of things, I’ve always been sort of skeptical of any concept related to luck,” says Carter. “Because as a sociologist, it’s like, Oh, so all those children in Darfur are just not lucky? We know that there are other things there.”

“His research is hilarious.”

Pick an envelope, any envelope.

Then Carter stumbled on Prof. Wiseman’s luck research (like his book The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles).

Prof. Wiseman started out as a magician and made his career researching the more unusual niches of psychology.

(His 2002 study was published in The Journal of Parapsychology. It is titled, “An Investigation into the Alleged Haunting of Hampton Court Palace: Psychological Variables and Magnetic Fields”).

By the 1990s he had taken on an unconventional project -- running experiments on self-proclaimed lucky and unlucky people... More