Be more lucky - by Przemek - pnote

The proposition sounds absurd, and yet we all know people who seem to be good at being lucky. They don’t try that hard and nice things just keep coming: they meet the right people at the right time, narrowly catch all trains and never get pooped on by birds. If we’re are not superstitious, then what could explain the patterns of good (or ill fortune) some of us experience? Richard Wieseman (University of Hertfordshire) describes an experiment in which people first self-identify as lucky or unlucky; and then start working on a simple task: counting the photographs in a newspaper. The pictures are easy enough to count: there are 43 of them. But the newspaper also contains something else: within one of the columns, there’s a piece of text that reads: Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250. Guess which group tends to find the hidden message more often? Why did the “unlucky” people miss the hidden message? According to Wieseman, people miss chance opportunities

The proposition sounds absurd, and yet we all know people who seem to be good at being lucky. They don’t try that hard and nice things just keep coming: they meet the right people at the right time, narrowly catch all trains and never get pooped on by birds. If we’re are not superstitious, then what could explain the patterns of good (or ill fortune) some of us experience? Richard Wieseman (University of Hertfordshire) describes an experiment in which people first self-identify as lucky or unlucky; and then start working on a simple task: counting the photographs in a newspaper. The pictures a