Calgary Skeptic’s Society Blog

Good Luck Charms are Everywhere!

I’m a third year student at the University of Calgary. A few weeks ago I had my last exam of the semester, and as I was waiting outside the exam room for it to start, I overheard a conversation between two first-year girls. One of them had been late to an exam the day before, and was obviously very upset about it – she said she didn’t think she did very well because she was so frazzled at being late, and so worried that she wouldn’t have enough time that she just rushed through all the questions.

Her reason for being late? She’d left her good luck charm at home. She was explaining to her friend that she has this lucky pencil case, and every time she takes it to an exam, she gets at least 75%. She told a story about one time in high school where she forgot the pencil case, and her mom couldn’t bring it to her in time for her test. And she failed the test.

Last year I was talking to a guy in one of my business classes who said he had an interview that afternoon. I wished him luck, and he said he he’d be okay because he was wearing his lucky hat. He was very confident about getting the job because he’d always been successful when wearing that hat.

You don’t see a lot of rabbit feet and horseshoes anymore, the classic images of good luck. People have gotten more creative. They assign the burden of being a good luck charm to a myriad of items – pencil cases and hats are just two of them.

In my first year at orientation, we did a short tour of all the good luck charms on campus, including several statues and pieces of art. There’s a railing in the Engineering building which we were told if you touch it before an exam, you’ll do well. There’s a statue called the Zipper in the sciences building that spins (it’s actually a pretty neat piece of art). If you spin it in a clockwise direction before an exam, the story goes, you’ll get the mark you were hoping for. And in the social sciences building (the tallest building on campus), someone has taken the time to write out a story throughout the staircase – one line on every step. It’s said that if you walk up the whole staircase and read the story line by line, you’ll be very successful after graduation. And then there’s the photo in the Kinesiology building of a man who graduated in 1974 with a perfect 4.0 GPA – students often rub his picture for good luck before exams or presentations. The glass in front of the photo has to be replaced frequently because it gets worn down from all the good luck being sucked out of it. (As it turns out, Bob Boston the good luck charm really only graduated with 3.2 at the highest – see the article in the Gauntlet for an interview with him from last year.)

The Nature of Good Luck

Good luck charms are an odd belief. How did the believers find their good luck charm? How do they know it’s lucky? Why is the object different for everyone? It seems very strange to me that you can arbitrarily choose any item, call it your good luck charm, and have complete confidence that it will get you through the tricky moments in your life. Why don’t people take charge of their lives, take responsibility for their failures, and even more importantly, take pride in their successes without crediting it to a photo or a statue or a railing or a hat or a pencil case? A belief in good luck charms is like the secular version of the belief that God will turn your life around (see Brandon’s post about “The Life Negation of Certain Religious Views”).

The Fallacy of Good Luck Charms

The main explanation for a belief in the effectiveness of good luck charms is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is often what’s behind people’s beliefs in psychics’ abilities as well. According to Wikipedia, “confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs”. It’s basically a subconsciously biased view of a phenomenon. People with good luck charms notice that when they have a certain hat or shirt with them, they do well, and when they don’t they do poorly, but they forget all the times they had the good luck charm and did poorly, or didn’t have it and did well.

Conclusion

A belief in good luck charms detracts from your successes. It gives all the credit for your hard work and effort, and the payout that comes with it, to an object that in reality did nothing at all. Perhaps, like the girl in my exam, having a certain object with you during a test or presentation comforts you, and therefore you’re more likely to do well. When you forget that object, like at the girl’s high school test, you feel less confident, and therefore do poorly. In my opinion, good luck is simply a matter of whether or not you feel confident independent of anything else.

Other Types of Luck

Last year I read Richard Wiseman’s The Luck Factor, a self-help book on how to make yourself luckier. Wiseman spent several months interviewing thousands of people on their thoughts on luck, splitting them into two groups – the lucky and the unlucky. Being a scientist and a skeptic himself, Dr. Wiseman didn’t prescribe the same sort of paranormal beliefs to luck – he didn’t think luck had anything to do with fate or some great powerful cosmic body. He based it on calculations – how many competitions have you won? How happy are you in life? How lucky have you been in the job market, or the stock market? How often do you find coins on the street? And so on.

He determined that it’s all a matter of opportunity – the lucky people tend to enter more contests than the unlucky ones, and as a result they tend to win more. Lucky people spend more time actively looking for coins on the street, or actively networking with people in order to build connections which could pay off later in life.

I’m on Wiseman’s side – luck isn’t about carrying around charms or following little rituals. It’s about the opportunities you give yourself. If you give yourself the opportunity to do well on a test, you’ll do well – rubbing a thirty-year-old photo won’t help one bit.