The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles [Hardcover]

The main difficulty with this claim is that at no point in his book does Wiseman present any sort of objective test for 'luck'. Rather, his subjects classify themselves as 'lucky' or 'unlucky' (and he simply takes their word for it) or else they are classified by him as such based on their own subjective evaluation of the degree to which they share certain characteristics with people who see themselves as either 'lucky' or 'unlucky'. Since the 'four principles' are based on data about people who feel lucky, rather than people who are lucky in some objective sense, the only honest claim that could be made based on Wiseman's research is that some people who follow his 'four principles' might begin to think of themselves as luckier.

The problem with using people's subjective evaluation of their own luckiness is revealed in an experiment (presented early in the book) to determine whether 'lucky' people have more psychic ability than 'unlucky' people. Seven hundred volunteers who phoned in upon viewing a particular television programme (Random population sample? Why bother?) were asked to categorise themselves as lucky, unlucky or neutral based on how well they felt they matched Wiseman's 'Lucky Description' or 'Unlucky Description'. Here's the Lucky description for reference (complete with grammatical errors):

"Lucky people are people for whom seemingly chance events tend to work out consistently in their favour. For example, they seem to win more than their fair share of raffles and lotteries, or to accidentally meet people who can help them in some way, or their good fortune might play an important role in them achieving their ambitions and goals."

All of the volunteers entered the same draw of the National Lottery, buying an average of three tickets each. None of the subjects won more than £56 pounds (that amount was won by two participants, one 'lucky' and one 'unlucky'). On average both 'lucky' and 'unlucky' participants lost about £2.50. Wiseman's conclusion: 'The results indicated that luck wasn't due to psychic ability'.

The results indicate something entirely different to me. The description of 'lucky' specifically talks about winning lotteries. Yet people who classified themselves as 'lucky' according to this description didn't do any better at the lottery than those who classified themselves as 'unlucky' (though 'lucky' people's expectations of winning were more than twice as high as those of 'unlucky' people). This would seem to indicate that the 'lucky' people who participated in this experiment were anything but. They may have been more optimistic, unrealistic, or self-deluding, but they weren't luckier.

Wiseman comments:

"When it comes to random events like the lottery, such expectations count for little. Someone with a high expectation of winning will do as well as someone with a low expectation. However, life is not like a lottery. Often our expectations make a difference. They make a difference to whether we try something, how hard we persist in the face of failure, how we interact with others and how others interact with us."

That's all very true, but when Wiseman admits that expectations 'count for little' when it comes to 'random events' he is more or less admitting that they have nothing to do with luck.

Wiseman goes on to analyse the characteristics of 'Lucky' people (i.e. those who think they are lucky, but probably aren't any luckier than the rest of us) and finds that they have several things in common. Unsurprisingly, they expect good fortune and they see the positive side to random events (for example, having just broken her leg in a freak accident, an 'unlucky' person would say 'It was bad luck' whereas a 'lucky' person would tend to say 'I'm lucky I wasn't killed').

Much of the evidence given in this book is anecdotal and many of the anecdotes intended to illustrate someone's luck or lack thereof fail miserably. Women who end up in successive abusive relationships are described as 'unlucky in love', though choice, not luck, determines who we marry; and a person who gets involved with someone she doesn't fully trust is better characterised as 'desperate' than 'unlucky'. Similarly, we hear anecdotes about 'lucky' people who enter contests and win prizes. We later learn that entering contests is their hobby and it's only because they enter so many that they win. Statistical probability is involved here, not luck.

But Wiseman doesn't hesitate to extract 'ways to improve your luck' from these instances. The women who are 'unlucky in love' are meant to show how we can improve our luck by trusting our intuition. (Despite the fact that they had blatant, as well as intuitive, indicators that their men were jerks). The contest winners supposedly illustrate that we can improve our luck by being more persistent-- though I fail to see how increasing one's chances of achieving something through deliberate, persistent and calculated effort has anything to do with 'luck'.

I'm sure some of the clichéd suggestions in this book (e.g. positive thinking and networking) will help some readers (those who haven't heard it all before) to improve their chances of achieving their goals. I doubt any of them will help readers to improve their luck. My opinion of this book would have been much higher if the author had straightforwardly framed his findings in terms of 'How to make the most of your opportunities.' I really would like to read some properly conducted scientific research which addresses the question of whether some people are innately luckier than others and, if so, what characteristics they share. Unfortunately, Dr. Wiseman seems to have different interests.