Just My Luck

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You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcast.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases, the show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Are you a lucky person, Dara?

Yeah, I think I'm a lucky person.

Do you?

Yeah, and you know, it's backed up by what the public often say to me.

You know, taxi drivers just say, God, you're lucky, aren't you?

You?

That and you're stealing a living and how long more do you have to put up with you?

So that's...

The public are very wise.

They are very wise.

I mean, there's a lot of wisdom in crowds.

I have a lot of crowds who shout that at me.

But generally, yes, I do.

Even as a kid, like my parents said, oh, if you fell off a cliff, you'd land on a mattress.

But like, do you, do you regard yourself as a lucky person?

I do.

I do regard myself as lucky.

But I sort of think when something bad almost happens and then it doesn't happen, that's like the biggest amount of evidence for me that it's like, oh, yeah, got away with that one.

You know?

See, this, this is like my Irish mammy, I crashed a car once and she said, oh, you're very lucky.

And I said, by definition, I'm not lucky.

I was just in a car crash.

But you are.

But she said, no, no, you're lucky because it wasn't worse.

And I go, but

it happened.

So, you know, there's a glass half full, glass half half.

There is a little bit.

Would have been so much worse.

But I'd like to think to be a lucky person, there must be some just brutal thing that I could walk into a casino,

just pick up the dice and snake eye.

And then is Snake Eye good or bad?

I think Snake Eye is something else altogether.

No, it's the two, you know, you two ones in a

go, Sarah, this is a roulette table.

You don't belong here.

Yeah.

But like that, that kind of like.

Do the cards land well for you?

Yes.

I mean, I think the cards have landed pretty well for you, Dara.

Yeah, I think we both agree that.

Yeah.

I mean, look at me.

I didn't win the genetic lottery.

And yet.

And

yeah, here we are sat across the table from me.

What more luck did you have?

Well, okay, this all came in because we had a question from Robin.

Have a listener to this.

Hi, my name is Robin, and I live in Warwick.

And despite being blind, I've always thought of myself as a really lucky person.

And I would like to know if some people are fundamentally more lucky than other people and if there's been any scientific research into what makes us lucky.

Is there any way we can affect our own luck?

And can we actually become luckier people through our own actions?

Thanks.

Tell you what I think is interesting there.

Yeah.

Is that Robin says, despite being blind, I've always thought of myself as a lucky person.

I think there's something really lovely in that, right?

There is.

And also, I think that it indicates that Robin has objectively been dealt a difficult hand and has clearly treated with a very positive attitude.

Yeah.

And that, I think, bleeds over into everything else.

Well, okay, luckily for us, we have got two amazing people who are going to help us answer these questions because joining us, we have Richard Wiseman, who is a professor of public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and David Spiegelhauser, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Cambridge University.

So, David, I mean, you seem like the person who could define this for us.

What is luck?

Oh, it's been called the operations of chance taken personally.

I tend to think of it as things that happen that were out of your control, you can't find a real cause for, and yet worked out either badly or well for you.

So, I don't think of it as some magical external force, the goddess Fortuna, that's shining down on us, but just something we apply afterwards to stuff that happened, which was good or bad.

So it's a retrospective take on things that just happened by chance.

Yeah, I think that's the best way to think about it.

But then, even in that, right, you could split it even further because there's sort of circumstantial luck.

Yeah, I love the deconstructions of luck.

Me too.

Yeah, yeah.

Actually, the first one, the most basic, is what's called existential luck, which is the luck of being here at all.

Now, you know, physicists know it's quite remarkable that even the galaxy exists, that all the constants have to be in this Goldilocks zone, zone.

And then the fact that life exists at all is extraordinary.

But I was thinking just of each of us personally, of how we came to be.

And if you think of the best way to think of it, how easily would it have been not to have been, not to exist?

You know, my grandfather was nearly killed in the First World War.

My mother was captured by pirates when she was young.

My father nearly died of TB on the operating table.

And then

I'd actually researched my own conception.

Now, it's very very difficult to think about your own conception, but I was born in August 1953, and that means I was conceived in late November 1952.

And I researched the weather records because they were living in a stone cottage built in 1820 in North Devon that I lived in as a kid.

And I know there's very little heating.

And it turned out that there was an incredible cold snap in the end of November 1952, which made the national news.

And so they had to keep warm.

And here I am.

But I might so easily not have been.

So easily may not have been.

So that's existential luck.

And then we got, I think, the other type, which is actually the most important, is constitutive luck, which is the luck of who you were born as.

Just who your parents were, the circumstances, the age and history, you know, the geography where you're born, the social class, everything, the opportunities you're born into, about which we can take zero responsibility at all and yet is so influential for the whole of the rest of our lives.

Now, you know, I was a sort of boomer, born into a very fortunate generation.

I had amazing constitutive luck.

And then you got, as you mentioned, the word circumstantial luck, which is being at the right place at the right time, or at the wrong place at the wrong time, like my grandfather, you know, being blown up by a shell as he was walking along a road near Passchendale.

So,

and then finally, what I like, outcome luck.

And that's the final bit of just how it happened to work out for you at that time.

That last little

consequence, which could go well or go badly.

For my grandfather, it went well because he survived.

Well, so he was lucky then.

He was incredibly lucky.

In the end, he was incredibly lucky to survive.

Yeah.

Because the thing is, I think that lots of this sort of very big picture stuff about, like, you know, you're lucky that we're not born during the bubonic plague, for instance, right?

We're very sort of lucky to live at a time in history when you can

make it into adulthood and like live a kind of comfortable life.

But I think that often when people use the word luck, they think much more about what you called circumstantial luck, right?

Like the sort of the chance encounters coincidences almost.

Meeting people on a train, you know, being on holiday and meeting somebody who you, you know, know from home.

They happen all the time to everybody, but they happen to some people more than others.

Do they?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I get people coming up and say, oh, you know, all these coincidences keep on happening to me.

You know, I saw somebody yesterday wearing, you know, a red coat and then later on in London I saw them again and I thought, I'd never notice any of that.

I wouldn't have.

So and then someone said, oh, I talked to this person I train and their children went to the same university.

I thought, I never talked to anyone on trains.

So people coincidence happen to are those who are actually observant and those who talk to other people.

I'm terribly English, I won't talk to anybody.

But is there, I mean, it's interesting that

the types of luck you define, some of them, it's almost like there's a scale of how invisible they are to people.

I mean, like, it's invisible to us, the anthropic principle that we were only here because

the conditions for life are all right.

Like, that is the greatest fluke chance of all, but yet it is so mindful.

Because if it hadn't occurred, we wouldn't be here anymore.

Or for a long time, we did not presume, and that's kind of almost a sociological debate about what the privilege of being born in certain strata, and we become more aware probably of that, but that was also quite invisible.

And yet we fixate on things like a chance meeting, but actually,

those occur so often that is it not inevitable that they're going to happen to somebody.

Exactly.

We focus on these downstream things that happen to us on a, you know, just on a day.

We don't, and then suddenly a surprise happens during the day.

And there is, I love it, they're great to hear about.

But in the end, you know, strange things happen because there's so many opportunities for them to happen.

I had a friend who had a joke years ago.

He said about walking down the street in Dublin, past 10,000 people, walked down another street in Dublin, past another 5,000 people, walked down another street in Dublin, past 7,000 people.

I see one person and I go, small world.

And there is a touch of, we like order, we like structure, and we like the sense of happy thing happening, and it must have therefore happened for a reason.

But there are, in terms of being lucky, in terms of a roll of the dice or a game, or is there any evidence that there are people who are who are like in that brutal sense of let's strip all the all the stuff away and just go for do people incur chance better?

Are there people for whom these things happen?

When it comes to things like dice and chance, no, if it's just an external force, I don't believe there is any external influence on events that make people luckier or not.

No, that's just chance.

Okay, but then hold on a second, though, right?

Because you could flip a coin here right and there is a small chance very small chance that that you might get 10 10 heads in a row

one in a thousand one in a thousand exactly yep he's getting coins out yeah oh okay fine we're actually doing this

of course a statistician always carries coins okay so i'm gonna flip this they've got they've got some fancy pouches here as well

so i'm gonna flip this coin gone yeah what's the probability this will be heads 50 50.

okay i'm gonna flip it and cover it up yep and i'm gonna look at it now what's your probability this is heads so is it still 50 50 for me yeah it's still 50 50 for you but you know the answer i know the answer so our uncertainty and our feeling about the surprise is is very personal it's to do with our relationship to the world and then of course i can show you the coin oh you cheated that's why it's in a fancy pounce it's double-sided yeah you don't let that slip into circulation it hasn't got any heads at all so you're so cocky with your first 50 50 but you've been completely deluded because you trusted me and so we can be very influential and easily influenced by you know what we believe is chance what we know we really have to check what is real true chance and what isn't okay I want to go back to this idea of like whether some people are more lucky in a way that they are not driving right in in a way that they're just more likely to go into a casino and the cards lay down in their favor because right you could flip a real coin not a sort of sneaky statistician strict coin yeah but you could flip a real coin 10 times in a row and

if a thousand people did it one of them probably would get 10 in a row and darren brown did it on his show.

He showed a continuous film, no cutting at all.

He flipped a coin 10 times in a row, 1 in 1,000 chance.

Only later revealed that they'd filmed for nine hours solid in order to get the final 10 flips.

And we've worked out that it was actually quite unlucky to take that long.

And my colleague James Grime tried it.

He did it in an hour.

It's all on YouTube.

It's the most tedious YouTube video you can ever think of, but he ends up by getting the 10 heads in a row.

This is really remarkable.

So he was quite lucky.

We'd expect it to take about four hours, four or five hours.

But then if you've got billions of people alive, right?

Yeah.

Some people surely will just by chance have more lucky lifetimes than others.

Oh yes, yeah, yeah.

That's just because stuff happens and there's huge variation in what happens and there's every opportunity.

Someone's going to win the lottery just because so many people buy tickets.

And it's just whether we're noticing it or not.

We attach meaning.

We attach it.

It's called apophenia.

We attach meaning to events that actually don't have any structure.

And we love to do that.

We want a story and a reason behind everything that happens.

And we do it very naturally.

We're storytellers as people.

I changed my whole philosophy researching my book when I found it

thinking about my conception and thought about that.

Because I think I used to think that I was on Earth for some reason.

And now I think I'm on Earth because it was a bit cold on November 1952.

And so, actually, I don't think that's a very good enough reason.

Richard, how do you see things in all this?

What's your definition of luck?

Well, in our research, we just use the idea of luck being a seemingly chance event that works out in your favor.

Then you're a lucky person.

So you're in the right place at the right time.

You bump into somebody that has a significant effect on your life.

You can always find a parking space when you want one.

All those sorts of things.

That's how we define luck.

And it turns out when you do that, that some people, around about 12% of the population, consider themselves exceptionally lucky.

And around about 9% consider themselves exceptionally unlucky.

They never get a break according to them.

And so we're interested in the psychology of that.

You know, why were these people living such different lives and what can you do to change people's luck?

Okay, so the real end game of this is how people perceive themselves.

And in fact, Professor Maya Young at UC Irvine in the US studies these kind of self-beliefs that people have.

My name is Maya Young and what I found in my research is that people who believe in luck, meaning I think of myself as a lucky person, are more likely to also believe in the value of superstitious behaviors.

Like it would be reasonable for someone to change their signature after signing several bad deals, or it'd be reasonable for a student to carry a special lucky pen when taking exams at school.

I think there's an impulse for people to wonder whether luck beliefs are rational or irrational.

I spend more time thinking about whether something's helpful or not helpful to us.

The people in my study who said that they were lucky were

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Also, more likely to say, I like to master things, I like to do things well, I like to persist even when I don't get positive feedback at first.

Maybe I'm failing at something at first, but I'm going to keep going at it.

And in that way, you can see that someone who has a luck belief actually

makes their own luck because they persist at something when they're not actually succeeding at first.

And you can probably imagine them actually succeeding more often if they are willing to choose tasks that are hard, if they're more willing to persist at tasks that are difficult.

Richard, you've studied all this.

This is the phrase I think that I was waiting to hear up here, makes their own luck.

I mean, to what extent is that a proper psychological phenomenon?

Oh, I think it's very real.

I mean, when you ask people, you know, are you lucky or unlucky?

They often have some kind of sense of that.

And sometimes it's tied to a particular domain.

They'll say, I'm lucky in love, but unlucky in my career, whatever it is.

And I think there's something genuinely authentic going on there.

So I think people do make their own luck by the way they think and behave.

It doesn't account for every single aspect of their lives.

There are many events which are outside our control.

But often, if you're a positive person, if you're on the lookout for opportunities, opportunities, if you're very flexible in your mindset, if you're very resilient, as we're just hearing that clip there, all those things will have a profound and dramatic effect on your life.

So I'm a big fan of taking luck seriously and not saying, oh, it's just, you know, irrational or it's superstitious.

We should ignore it.

It has survived across time for a very good reason.

And it's deeply embedded in our psyche, I think, because it really matters to our lives.

What are the differences between, let's put in quotation marks, a lucky person and an unlucky one?

Oh, I mean, I've met hundreds of them over the years and the researcher interviewed many.

And you can almost walk in the room and tell them straight away.

So the lucky people are a lot more alert, they're engaged, they're very flexible in their thinking.

So when an opportunity comes up, they'll make the most of it.

And they are open to those opportunities.

The unlucky people, you know, life isn't going so well for them.

According to them, it's not their fault.

And of course, our emotions are contagious.

So you walk into a room with somebody who doesn't feel quite so lucky and you start to feel a bit down yourself.

And so those people often become a bit more socially isolated, which means they don't have opportunities and resilience associated with social support.

So yeah, there's all sorts of things which make up the psychology of luck.

And I think it's absolutely fundamental to our identity.

Can you be trained to be lucky?

Can you be trained to think yourself to be lucky?

Yeah, that's what we did.

We did a whole series of studies called Luck School, where we got got people to think and behave differently.

And around about a third, maybe 40% of people can change the way they think and behave.

The easiest thing, which I always used to talk about, it's been something we can all do tonight, is keeping a luck diary.

So before you go to bed, you just jot down, and you do have to write it down.

It doesn't work if you just think about it.

You jot down the luckiest thing that's happened to you today.

And you do that every night.

And after about two weeks, you've kind of built up this evidence in front of you of you being a luckier person.

And that then impacts how you see yourself, which then impacts all the things I'm talking about.

So it's a really simple intervention, but actually it's quite an effective one.

If you attach electrodes to people and every time they said something about them being unlucky, you zap them, would that be counterproductive?

Would they...

Would it on the one hand, I'm thinking this methodology isn't perfect, is it?

I'm liking the sound of it.

Yeah, it just feels like they would think, it's unfortunate I'm in this study.

Yeah, I think it'd be a tricky one to get through ethics.

But a shout out to the unlucky, though, because if you have that attitude ingrained, is there a confirmation bias element?

You're just going to, you're going to see proof of this.

Oh, usually.

And

same with luck.

I mean, good luck.

Yeah, so absolutely.

You see the negative things in your life.

And that's not to deny them.

This is not to deny the reality of that.

People have very difficult lives.

So it absolutely isn't.

And a lot of that is beyond their control.

We have to say that.

But a good percentage is about how we see events.

So in our study, we had the imaginary scenario that we put to almost everyone, which was imagine you're in a bank, inbursts a robber, they fire a gun and the bullet hits you in the arm.

Are you lucky or unlucky?

And our unlucky people would go, Of course I'm unlucky.

I've just been hit by a bullet in the arm.

I can't believe you're even suggesting that I could be lucky.

The lucky people would go, my goodness, amazing good luck.

Could have been my my head, could have been my heart.

You know, if it's a big braid, I'll sell my story to some journalists, I'll make some money, and so on.

So

you could give people exactly the same event and it'd be perceived in two dramatically different ways.

Yeah, that's the

Irish mammy test.

It's the Irish mammy test.

The Irish mammy test, like whatever.

Well, aren't you lucky you didn't get killed the time you crashed your car into a wall?

I crashed my car into a wall.

But Irish mammies, they spin that up, they spin it up the entire time.

Luck of the Irish, that's what it comes down to.

Honestly, there's no backing for that at all.

But we will, you know, yeah, thanks.

We'll take the phrase.

It's just the mammies.

Yeah, it's just mammies talking you up.

What was the task you use?

You're saying like using involving a newspaper?

Yeah, that was one of our many studies.

This was to do with opportunities.

So the lucky people would say, you know, I get all these opportunities all the time.

The unlucky people would say, you know, I never get a break.

We wanted to see whether or not there was anything to that.

Were the lucky people more likely to notice opportunities?

So what we did was have them come into the lab, we gave them a newspaper, and they had to flick through and count the number of photographs and illustrations in the newspaper.

It's really dull.

What we didn't tell them is we placed two half-page ads in the newspaper.

These things were huge.

And one of them said, stop counting.

There are 52 photographs in here.

And the other one said, win £100 by telling the experimenter, you've seen this.

And so it was amazing.

The unlucky people tended to go straight past them.

It was just another unlucky day.

And the lucky people would stop and go, oh my goodness, it's great.

Can I have my £100?

And we'd explain it was just an experiment.

They weren't that lucky.

But

still,

it was this notion that to some extent they were creating their own luck by noticing these opportunities or not.

Tell you what, you mentioned unlucky people there a couple of times.

We just so happened to have someone who is known as the unluckiest man on British television, Edward Oldfield.

Thank you for joining us.

You're bringing the average amount of luck in this room down to a nice level.

Do you know what?

My luck goes beyond my own personal bad luck.

The number of television shows I've been on, and then after I've been on it, that show is axed.

So hold on a second then.

How did you gain this title of being the unluckiest man on British television?

I applied to go and come down with me.

I went on it, came last, so spoiled the fun there if you want to watch the show at any time.

But then about 18 months later, it was voted the funniest episode of all time by readers of the Radio Times.

And then that little chink chink goes off in your head and thinks like, hmm, you know, television likes me.

And I got a couple of tip-offs about different shows.

And I started to think, well, I lost on Come Down With Me, but there is a chance of making money if you go on quiz shows, which is what I did.

And then about 10 or so quiz shows later, still not won anything.

But how can you sustain?

You keep losing, don't you?

Keep losing, yeah.

54 shows and counting.

54 separate quiz/slash game shows.

Television shows.

So different things.

So say, for example, with Britain's Got Talent.

Yeah, £250,000.

If I win, I went on two consecutive series of Britain's Got Talent as a comedian.

Right.

Sarah?

Yeah.

And I lost.

But do you work as a comedian?

No.

Well, then,

there's a flaw in your method here.

Also, to be fair, almost everybody loses Britain because there's only one winner.

What would happen now if you actually did win something?

Oh, I'd retire.

I'd retire.

I'm like a compulsive gambler.

The wife says to me, look, you know, you need to give up on this.

You're making a fool of yourself.

You don't actually do anything sensible.

I mean, an example of that is when

somebody rang me up from Ninja War UK and said, Do you fancy Dude, Ted, with Ninja War UK?

And I said, Oh, do you know my?

I'll get a bit on him in my days now, it's not really a show that I do.

He said, Well, you'll know that we always put somebody on that dresses up in some silly outfit, makes a fool of himself.

And I said, Yeah, I'll do it.

And I think that's the thing.

It was like Richard Wiseman was saying before.

Take every opportunity that's available to you because that is the first step.

Yeah, but yeah, you're unlucky.

He's honestly the entire message.

You've just ruined it at the end.

You're positive, you're taking all the opportunities

and yet you remain unlucky.

Unlucky.

I'm a good loser, though.

I think that's the key thing.

What to losing?

I'm laughing off.

You know, you sort of look on the positive side of things.

Are you keeping a diary of how lucky you are every day?

What do you reckon, Richard?

Anything we can do to change Edward's luck?

No, I think it's beyond help.

Beyond help, thank you.

Well, no, what's interesting is that actually you're rather enjoying being unlucky.

And so that's key to it.

So probably it's not that much motivation to change.

You might be rather disappointed if suddenly things started going your way.

So, you know, as long as you're comfortable with being unlucky in this particular sphere of your life,

then I think

that's great.

Yeah, may your bad luck continue for the foreseeable future.

I think it's a brand now, right?

There's victory in failure.

Yeah, there is, yeah.

I think it's one good.

I think, I think, you know, I think it doesn't with you come down to luckier and lucky.

I think it's a more profound psychological issues that we really don't have the time.

We honestly have to go through it all.

Edward, thank you very much.

Good luck.

What's the next one?

I can never say until it's aired, but just you watch that small screen.

Well, it's probably a big screen these days, isn't it?

A 52-inch darrow or something.

Yeah.

You'll see me one day, don't worry.

Very good.

So, Richard, can you change your luck?

I think everyone can improve their luck.

Absolutely.

I mean, there's always going to be limitations on it.

I mean, as we said before, it depends, you know, the sort of social class and parents and circumstance and so on.

But within any of those groups, yeah, I think there's things you can do to improve your luck.

And it's not that difficult.

It is a question of change.

And often, you know, we do find change quite challenging because we don't really understand how our minds work.

But once you get your head around the idea that to some extent, you know, you're creating some of the bad and good luck by the way you're thinking and behaving, absolutely.

David, why have you taken out a pack of cards?

Well, it's this, you know, what Richard just said reminds me of this phrase, making the best of the hand you've been dealt.

Yes.

You can't choose who you're born as, but people can try to make the best out of it.

And I always say I like the analogy of that because we're all biologically unique, we're all totally unique, and it leads to this idea that if you do a decent shuffle of the cards,

that's unique as well.

I've just shuffled the cards properly and I can just be really confident that no one in the entire human history has ever had a shuffle in that order before.

And I can shuffle them again

and I can open them up and I can say I can be really confident, not logically sure, but I can be as more confident of anything else I could ever claim that no one has ever had the cards in that order before.

And that's unlike the sort of coincidences I was doing before, this is where a coincidence is much less likely than people think it is.

Because people think that, you know, I had the shuffle and piece and that shuffle will occur again.

No, it won't.

It won't.

Not in your lifetime.

Never.

And so that's an idea where the maths works to make things far less likely, you think.

And the point is, because there's so many shuffles.

I think it's 10 to the 67 shuffles or something.

That's the same as the number of atoms in the galaxy.

And people find that really difficult to grasp.

Is that a bit of a nihilistic tone of chance?

We are merely particles, this thing in the universe.

So honestly, have a good attitude, have a bad attitude, makes no difference.

You are merely a particle floating floating through the galaxy, one of 10 to the 67 particles,

and it's not going to make any difference either way.

I think we're not going to get either more philosophical or more accurate than that, frankly.

Let's say thank you very much to all of our guests, Richard Wiseman, my young, Edward Oldfield, and David Speaker.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Yeah, so look, there's nothing we can do about the universe,

but it's in the mind.

Basically, we were right all along.

Yeah.

That's going to be assuring.

You need to listen to the whole episode.

Do you know why we were right all along?

Tell me.

Because we're lucky people.

You're absolutely right.

Ah, it's opportunity.

As long as you believe there are opportunities, then you can do it.

So many positive messages, but the main one is we're delighted with ourselves.

I do like that idea, though, right?

I do like that idea of just seeing things through that lens of like, yeah, it's going to work out for me.

Because it sort of always does.

No, no, no.

And even if when things haven't, it sort of opened other doors and you did something else, and then you were able to fold it into a narrative where, ah, this is probably what was supposed to happen.

I mean, if you can get an anecdote out of any of the things.

Honestly, if something bad happens, if something embarrassing happens, something awful happens, you go, oh, there's a tour done.

I'm going to be telling this story for years.

And isn't that lucky?

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Greetings, malevolent munchkins, fiendish friends and devilish do-gooders.

Welcome back to the home of the Oxymoron.

Evil Genius!

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It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Yes, it's evil.

Yes, it's genius.

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