Understanding Luck: Lucky Personality Traits
Barry Carter begins a new series on the scientific studies surrounding luck to help you broaden your understanding of variance in poker and life.
Earlier this year I wrote about the four types of luck identified by Dr James Austin. One of them, 'blind luck', we have no control over, the three other types we do. 'Persistence luck' is the good fortune that comes when we constantly take shots at lofty goals. 'Observed luck' is the ability to spot opportunities others cannot because of a knowledge edge we have. The 4th type, the ‘luck that finds you’, comes when unique opportunities come our way because we have established ourselves as skilled in a particular area.
Since looking at Dr Austin’s work I have been fascinated by the scientific literature on luck. In poker we try to resist the luck aspect of the game because the skill element is within our control. However, while we have no control over blind luck, it is hard to refute that we can put ourselves in better positions to receive good fortune.
I have recently read Professor Richard Wiseman’s book The Luck Factor in which he studies a sample of thousands of people who declared themselves either lucky or unlucky to see what they had in common. He quickly took blind luck out of the equation, with tests for blind luck like picking winning lottery numbers. The ‘lucky’ people had the same (poor) results as the ‘unlucky’ people for blind luck tests. What he was left with was the same traits replicated across the two sets of volunteers.
More chance opportunities
I’m going to write about each of the traits separately but today I want to start with probably the most important finding. Wiseman found that self-declared ‘lucky’ people made the most of the chance opportunities they found themselves in. Lucky people noticed more opportunities and had more chance opportunities.
For example, lucky people tended to score highly for the personality traits extraversion and openness to experience. As a result they found themselves in more novel social situations, they would talk to strangers more often, had a bigger network of friends and kept in better contact with acquaintances. The more social situations you put yourself in, the more chances you have to run into good luck. If you have landed a job because a friend told you about one going at their workplace and they recommended you, this is a prime example of this kind of luck. If you met your significant other via an acquaintance, as many people do, this is another example. It’s not that extraverted people are actually luckier, just they are in more situations where they can get lucky. If you find yourself staying at home at weekends, you significantly reduce your chances of being in ‘the right place at the right time’.
Lucky people also noticed more opportunities than unlucky people. Wiseman did a number of tests including orchestrating situations where self-declared lucky and unlucky people would have money lying around on the floor in front of them. Lucky people noticed the cash on the floor when they walked by, unlucky people rarely did. The reason for this, Wiseman argues, is that unlucky people tend to have much more anxiety than lucky people. Anxiety tends to hyper focus you on whatever is in your head at the time, so you are less likely to notice things like £5 on the floor. He also argued this is why they had more accidents, because they are paying less attention to the world around them they don’t see hazards in front of them.
Good fortune can be influenced
To demonstrate this, Wiseman conducted a test on all his volunteers where he asked them to count how many pictures were in a newspaper. However, on the second page of the paper there was a headline which read ‘STOP COUNTING – THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER’ and half way through another headline which read ‘STOP COUNTING, TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU HAVE SEEN THIS AND WIN £100.’ Nobody in either the lucky or unlucky groups noticed the headlines, showing that when you are hyper focussed on something you miss out on opportunities around you. Even the ‘lucky’ people missed the chance to win £100 because they were taken out of their usual more relaxed mindset.
This all correlates with the ‘persistence luck’ and ‘observed luck’ identified by Dr James Austin. There is blind luck on both ends of the spectrum. Dan Bilzerian had very little part in the affluent circumstances he was born into and some unfortunate people are born into situations that most people cannot overcome. But there are clear traits found among lucky and unlucky people that are within our control. Lucky people tend to put themselves in more positions to get lucky.
How does this help with poker? Not too much right now, to begin with I just wanted to introduce the idea that there is blind luck and there is luck we can influence by virtue of showing up more. Stay tuned for more on what Richard Wiseman discovered separated lucky and unlucky people that is within all of our control.
How do you think you influence the good and bad luck in your own life? Let us know in the comments:
