By Professor Richard Wiseman

**Section 1**

[1] People have searched for an effective way of improving the good fortune in their lives for many centuries. Lucky charms, such as keeping a rabbit’s foot, have been found in virtually all civilizations throughout recorded history. The pagan ritual of ‘knocking on wood’ was designed to elicit the help of benign and powerful tree gods. Superstition represents people’s attempts to control their destiny by warding off bad luck while enhancing the good.

**Section 2**

[2] There is just one problem. Superstition doesn’t work. At least it doesn’t work in the way most people think it does. Superstition is based on outdated and incorrect thinking. It comes from a time when people thought that luck was a strange force that could only be controlled by magical rituals and bizarre behaviors. Several researchers have tested these age-old beliefs and found them wanting.

**Section 3** [3] Ten years ago, I started to examine why some people consistently encounter chance opportunities whereas others do not. In my experiment, I first asked volunteers to complete a questionnaire to determine if they considered themselves lucky or unlucky. Then I gave each group a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside.

[4] On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message “Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in text that was over two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

[5] Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense and anxious than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people’s ability to notice the unexpected. The harder they looked, the less they saw. And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.

[6] The experiment I conducted revealed that luck is not a magical ability or the result of random chance. Nor are people born lucky or unlucky. Instead, although lucky and unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their fortune. My research revealed that lucky people are more skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities.

**Section 4**

[7] But a lucky life is not just about noticing chance opportunities. Another important principle revolved around the way in which lucky and unlucky people dealt with the ill fortune in their lives. Imagine competing in the Olympic Games. You do very well and win a bronze medal. How happy do you think you would feel? Most of us would, I suspect, be overjoyed and proud of our achievement. Now imagine we did even better and won a silver medal. Most of us think we would feel even happier with a silver medal.

[8] But research suggests that athletes who win bronze medals are actually happier than those who win silver medals. And the reason for this has to do with the way in which the athletes think about their performance. The silver medalists focus on the notion that if they had performed slightly better, then they would have perhaps won a gold medal. In contrast, the bronze medalists focus on the thought that if they had performed slightly worse, then they wouldn’t have won anything at all. This is “counterfactual” thinking, and it is often associated with perceptions of luck.

**Section 5. Positive Skepticism**

[9] After ten years of scientific research, my work has revealed a radically new way of looking at luck and the vital role that it plays in our lives. It demonstrates that much of the good and bad fortune we encounter is a result of our thoughts and behavior. More importantly, it represents the potential for change and has produced an effective way of increasing the luck people experience in their daily lives. The research is not simply about debunking superstitious thinking and behavior. Instead, it is about encouraging people to move away from a magical way of thinking and toward a more rational view of luck. Perhaps most important of all, it is about using science and skepticism to increase the level of luck, happiness, and success in people’s lives.