Hot Hand and Lucky Personality: Could good luck bring good luck and bad luck really bring bad luck?

Hot Hand and Lucky Personality: Could good luck bring good luck and bad luck really bring bad luck?

To look into luck is to take on one of the grandest of all the questions: how can we explain what happens to us, and if we will be winners, losers or somewhere in the middle in relation to love, work, sports, gambling and life.

The studies show that luck can be powered by past good or bad luck, personality and, in a higher twist, even our own ideas and beliefs about luck itself. Lucky streaks are real, but they are the product of more than just  blind fate. Our ideas about luck influence the way we behave in risky situations.

We really can make our own luck, though we don’t like to think of ourselves as lucky - a description that undermines other qualities, like talent and skill-.

Luck can be a force, but it’s one we interact with, mould and cultivate.

Diverse points of view provide different perspectives on luck: if a secular man survived because he had a meeting outside his office at the World Trade Center on the morning of 11 September 2001, he might simply have thought that it was a   casual chance in life without assigning a deeper meaning. A Hindu might conclude he had good karma. A Christian might say God had looked after him. The mystic could insist he was born under lucky stars

Traditionally, the Chinese think luck is an inner trait, like intelligence or a cheerful mood, notes Maia Young, a management expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “My mom always used to tell me, ‘You have a lucky nose’, because its particular shape was a lucky one, according to Chinese tradition”. But there is another cultural difference in perceptions of luck. “In Chinese culture,” she says, “hard work can go hand-in-hand with being lucky. And the belief system accommodates both.”

Nevertheless, Westerners see effort and good fortune from opposite corners of the ring. We are ambivalent about luck. We live in a society that is neither random nor entirely meritocratic, that makes the relationship between “hard work” and “luck” more complex.

To illustrate, when a friend is admitted into a top law or medical school, we might say: ‘Congratulations! You’ve persevered. You deserve it.’ Were she not to get in, we would say: ‘Acceptance is arbitrary. Everyone’s qualified these days. It’s a question of luck.’

The scientists have researched luck often looking to sports –mainly basketball and baseball-, where chance plays a role in even the most skill-reliant players, and outcomes are easy to measure.

One of the most studied phenomena in the field is lucky streaks, where players seem to be on fire, so to speak –the official term for it is “hot hands”.

A landmark paper by Stanford psychologists, published in 1985, declared that the “hot hand” did not exist and was instead an illusion born of the deep established tendency to see patterns in our environments. They called it

‘The Hot-Hand Fallacy’.

However, in 2014 three Harvard University students caused big trouble for hot-hand deniers. They reasoned that, once a player is hot, he might be encouraged to take more difficult shots, supporting then the hot-hands effect. (Previous studies falsely assumed a random assortment of shots by players.) The students examined in detail a video consisting of 83,000 shot attempts from the 2012-13 US National Basketball Association season, giving them enough information to assess the difficulty of the shots. First of all, they showed that players who felt ‘hot’, in fact start taking harder shots. And, after taking in to account the difficulty of each shot selected, they found a small significant hot-hands effect – that is, those who did well began to do even better over time.

Around the same time, another group from the University of California, Berkeley found that opponents intensify their defence against hot players – thereby acting against a hot-hands effect. Previous research didn’t have enough data to account for this sufficiently, and thus interpreted any decline in a hot player’s performance as evidence that he was not on a streak.

Given the above premises, the Berkeley group decided to look at the sport of baseball, where there is almost nothing an opposing team can do to frustrate a hitter on a roll. They were on to something: when they analysed 12 years of data from Major League Baseball, they found that how a player performed the most recent 25 times at bat was a significant predictor of how he would do the next time. They also calculated that a hot player was 30 % more likely to hit a home run than if he were not on a winning streak. Lucky streaks are real and not just an illusion, they said.

But what causes them? Is it truly luck, or something else? Perhaps it is a question of possibilities. That’s the suggestion from research into both winning and losing streaks from University College London. Researchers analysed about half a million sports bets (courtesy of an online gambling company) and found that those on winning streaks were much more likely than to keep winning, and those on losing streaks were more likely to keep losing,  than a 50/50 chances would suggest.

Then the team dug deeper to expose why these streaks were in fact real: it was the bettors’ behaviour. As soon as they realised they were winning, they made safer bets, supposing their streaks could not last forever. In other words, they did not believe themselves to have hot hands that would stay hot. A different impulse drove gamblers who lost. They guessed that lady luck was due for a visit, fell for the gambler’s fallacy and made riskier bets. As a result, the winners kept winning (even if the amounts they won were small) and the losers kept losing.

If behaviour influences luck, do people who think of themselves as lucky behave differently from the rest of us?

A 2009 study assessed whether students believed in stable luck as a trait they themselves possessed. A relationship is found between the belief in stable luck (versus fleeting luck) and measures of achievement and motivation, including whether or not the students persisted at tasks or chose challenging ones to begin with. Lucky people, it seems, are more ambitious. Those who believe in stable luck will be more motivated to pick difficult goals and then stick with them. If they consider luck as a chance, as something ephemeral, then they can’t rely on it because it comes and goes and they might be less motivated to face hard and challenging tasks.

These findings fit together with the work of R. Wiseman, professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and author of the book The Luck Factor (2003). He says that the best way to look at luck is as a stable trait – not one that people are born with, but one they can cultivate. Wiseman searched for people who considered themselves consistently very lucky or unlucky by gathering data from 400 subjects. He found that ‘lucky’ people are skilful at creating and noticing chance opportunities (such as meeting an important businessman at a café), listen to their intuition, have positive expectations that create self-fulfilling prophesies, and have a relaxed and resilient attitude about life’s trials. Poor unlucky souls are more tense and anxious than lucky ones.

Wiseman split the tendencies of the lucky group into behavioural interventions such as getting people to imagine how things could have been worse when they were faced with misfortune or, more generally, asking them to ‘switch their daily routine’. As a result, 80 per cent of the unlucky group reported that, after just a month, they were happier, more satisfied with their lives, and yes, luckier.

The more one thinks about luck and the new insights into it, the more its paradoxes come down. Consider optimism: it was one of the key qualities of lucky people identified by Wiseman. These might win at life, but their sunny outlooks could get them in trouble in Las Vegas.

This is exactly what happened to Archie Karas. Just three weeks after he won $40 million, he lost it all. His ‘lucky streak’ turned into a net loss of $50. In addition to that, in 2013 Karas was charged with burglary, winning by fraudulent means and cheating at a blackjack table in Lakeside, California. But fortune smiled on him, slightly: he was placed on probation, escaping a potential three-year prison sentence.

Things could always be worse.

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