Also, the point about history is probably a factor. For instance, I had an extremely unlucky pick in who I married but I’m sure the dysfunctional family life I endured as a child has to be a factor. Now I avoid marriage like the plague because I learned the hard way how the wrong love can fuck your life up forever, even after he’s dead, because I married him. Who knows what wonderful love I’m throwing away with the bath water?

I’m getting reflective in my old age and the older I get the more and the more I learn I realize how totally screwed I was by my lousy child and those two people who shouldn’t even had had one child having 8 in 10 years time because they left it up to God.

And that whole I’ll teach you to be lucky promise creeps me out. It sounds rather cult-like and controlling. Vague empty promises if you do things as I tell you to.

From the article

For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: “Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250.” Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity

I was thinking the same thing until I read through the article. If the ‘unlucky’ people had seen that I don’t see how they would not attempt to claim the prize. Then again, maybe it could have been thought of as an attempt to make them lose their count.

I wonder how much the “lucky” people really were confident because things already had gone well, and how much the “unlucky” ones were responding to a history of things going wrong?
And I wonder how much the improved outlook actually made it better for them or just made them not feel so bad about being unlucky.

I wonder what would it do to the results if n subjects took over two minutes, but answered with the caveat: “well, page two said forty-three photos, but I wanted to be sure.”?

And there’s the discovery that people who are depressed are supposedly better at judging their own abilities; is there perhaps a connection here?

( I can’t seem to find a good reference, but this recent blog post makes some other points that might be relevant: http://psych.drew3000.net/the-upside-of-depression/ )

Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

Were I presented with this challenge, I’d ignore that line and count the photos anyway just because I’d assume you were trying to trick me.

Luck has a lot more to do with attitude than with events.

Is their opinion of themselves a scientific way of determining what their “luck factor” is? This is bunk.

Well, considering that luck is subjective, then I suppose it is. One person might think themselves lucky to have survived cancer, but another unlucky to get it in the first place. Cancer is oblivious to the human perception of luck, so it is up to the person to decide whether or not they consider it luck or not.

This research seems to point to the fact not that people make their own luck (since it doesn’t exist), but by lacking confidence (seeing themselves as unlucky) they can miss opportunities they might otherwise have gained.