|
making luck
Inspired by a recent issue of Cabinet, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately on chance, risk, luck, and related concepts. Doing random Google searches on the word "luck" led me to this Fast Company article about the relationship between an individual's luckiness and his or her degree of optimism.
Researcher Richard Wiseman, interviewed in the article, suggests not only that optimists perceive more "luckiness" when reviewing any particular event (although they do), but also that this outlook is, in fact, self-fulfilling, that to believe you are lucky attunes you to the presence of opportunity.
Now, the power of positive thinking may not exactly help you beat Vegas, and the whole power-of-positive-thinking spin here seems very, uh, Fast Company to me, but I was intrigued by Wiseman's description of the experiment his research department used to test this theory:
"We asked subjects to flip through a newspaper 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.
"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."
Even longtime readers of this blog may not know that a decade ago I wrote a novel about Las Vegas. Labels: perception |
Thursday, January 19, 2006
1:52 PM
|
