Lucky Unlucky

[Giacometta Fritchman]

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At this point in my life, I began to wonder if I had walked under one too many ladders, had inadvertently broken a mirror, or that our pet black cat was piling up bad luck on me one day after another. It seemed that I was a magnet for unluckiness.

My path through high school, college, and early adulthood was similar. I had a couple of knee surgeries and several sports-related injuries. Then, when I hit my middle-age years, I bought the obligatory Harley Davidson motorcycle. One weekend, I was on a ride when a man driving a pickup truck pulled out in front of me. I swerved to miss him, ran off the road, and crashed my bike. Unluckily, my Harley was totaled. Luckily, I was not. I did get ten stitches in my chin which conveniently covered the previous scar from my gymnastics floor encounter. I considered that an economic use of chin space.

When we moved back to Central Virginia a few years ago, I felt lucky that we finally lived in an area where I could ride my motorcycle on beautiful scenic roads and not encounter a lot of traffic. Unluckily, six months after we moved here, I found myself in an emergency room with no idea of how I got there. My wife informed me that I had been in yet another motorcycle accident and unluckily, had hit my head. The concussion left me with no memory of the accident nor the five hours afterwards. Luckily, I had no other serious injuries. Unluckily, I no longer had a motorcycle. Or is that luckily? You be the judge.

Lucky and unlucky people see the same event differently, says Richard Wiseman.We have John Sall, the chief architect of JMP, to thank for making us aware of Richard Wiseman and his research on luck in his book The Luck Factor.

We were so impressed and entertained with his plenary talk at JMP Discovery Summit Europe last year that we invited him to speak at JMP Discovery Summit Japan last year and next month at JMP Discovery Summit in St. Louis.

Richard has a remarkable title: Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology in the United Kingdom. And he is also a professional magician, and the author of several journal articles and best-selling popular psychology books. His YouTube channel, Quirkology, is one of the most watched in the UK.

I became interested in the psychology of superstition, and why we all cross our fingers, avoid walking under ladders, and so on. When I interviewed people, they started to talk about being lucky and unlucky. At the time, psychologists had pretty much ignored the idea because they had thought that luck was either just chance or people were fooling themselves. I managed to gather together 1,000 lucky and unlucky people, and immediately we started to see differences in the way they were thinking and behaving.

Much of it is to do with mood. When you are in a good mood your perception becomes very expansive, and you start to notice things that you might otherwise miss. Maybe you bump into someone at a party and realise that they would be perfect for a project that you are working on, or you see an advertisement in a newspaper that you would have otherwise skipped over. In contrast, unlucky people tend to be very anxious, and so tend to just focus on what they are looking for, rather than what is right in front of them.

Richard Wiseman is a keynote speaker at Discovery Summit 2017. You can learn more about him and read the abstract of his talk "The Luck Factor." You might also like to watch his interview on Analytically Speaking.

Lucky and Unlucky are two account-wide title tracks that together measure a player's luck in games of chance or in using lockpicks to open chests. Each title can be displayed at the "Honor" monument from tier 2 onwards.

There are three ways to gain Lucky (and Unlucky) points in large quantities: Winning (and losing) the Nine Rings game, winning (and losing) the Rings of Fortune game, and retaining (and breaking) lockpicks.

Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, these 73 tales of our Unlucky Lucky Days might well be termed Dr. Seuss for adults. They call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales and Woody Allen's most literary writing. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, absurdists, surrealists and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham.

The Thing is: passively the lucky trait DOES indeed lower chances of becoming a zombie, because of the reduced chance of getting bitten/scratched. The Lucky and Unlucky Trait are the total opposite of the same thing.

To be more specific about loot, lucky adds 1.0 to all loot chances. For comparison, a lot of items are 1-4 in loot chance, some 0.5, and the rare ones 0.1 (nothing lower is possible without additional modded coding). Adding 1 to everything basically increases the chances of getting rare loot by 1000%, uncommon loot by 300%, and very common loot gets decreased a bit to make up for that, by which I mean I think you still get the same total amount of loot spawned, just that the rarer stuff is far more common than before.

"What are some of the ways that lucky people think differently from unlucky people?

One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

How did you uncover that in your lab?

We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, "There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?" We'd say, "Yeah, carry on." They'd flip some more and say, "Do I get my 150 pounds?" Most of the unlucky people didn't notice.

But the business culture typically worships drive -- setting a goal, single-mindedly pursuing it, and plowing past obstacles. Are you arguing that, to be more lucky, we need to be less focused?

This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others. It's about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what's around them and to maximize what's around them.

Much of business is also about rational analysis: pulling up the spreadsheet, running the numbers, looking at the serious facts. Yet you found that lucky people rely heavily on their gut instincts.

Yes. You don't want to broadly say that whenever you get an intuitive feeling, it's right and you should go with it. But you could be missing out on a massive font of knowledge that you've built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That's what our brains are set up to do.

What are some other ways you found that lucky people's minds operate differently?

They practice "counterfactual thinking." The degree to which you think that something is fortunate or not is the degree to which you generate alternatives that are better or worse.

Unlucky people say, "I can't believe I've been in another car accident." Lucky people go, "Wonderful. Yes, I had a car accident, but I wasn't killed. And I met the guy in the other car, and we got on really well, and there might be a relationship there." What's interesting is that both ways of thinking are unconscious and automatic. It would never occur to the unlucky people to see it a different way.

Isn't there something delusional about that approach -- sort of a modern version of Dr. Pangloss's "All for the best in the best of all possible worlds"? Suppose I said, "I just wrote this article, and the article stinks, and nobody read it. But hey, at least I have two arms."

What's so delusional about that? If it keeps you going in the face of adversity and softens the impact of the fact that no one read your article, and therefore you think, "Well, I can write another article, and I'm going to learn from the mistakes of the past one, and I'm going to keep on going," I think that's fine. It would be delusional if you took it to the extreme -- especially if you weren't learning from your mistakes."

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