Counting on the luck of the lucky

“We must believe in luck,” according to the late French filmmaker, Jean Cocteau, “For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?”

Cocteau might have been joking, but some serious researchers in the US recently entertained a closely related question. They asked: how do we feel about people who are lucky and unlucky? And what they found undermines Cocteau’s contention. Rather than attributing luck to the unworthy, we tend to think that those who have luck must be worthy. Similarly the unlucky are deemed undeserving.

The team, which included researchers at Harvard University, University of California and Stanford University, also asked: Do our feelings about the lucky and unlucky change between early childhood and adulthood? And do people in the West respond differently to the lucky and unlucky from those in the East?

Eight experiments were conducted with children between the ages of three and 12 from a wide range of ethnicities, races, towns, states, countries, and social classes in the US and Japan.

The children were asked to consider scenarios about individuals who perform intentionally good acts (such as sharing toys) or bad acts (such as cheating on a test) and those who experience good luck (such as finding $5 on the sidewalk) or bad luck (such as getting rained on). The research team asked the children how they felt about the individuals in the scenarios and how they expected them to behave in the future.

Not only did young children prefer lucky individuals to unlucky ones, children predicted that the lucky were more likely to perform intentional good acts and that the unlucky were more likely to perform intentional bad acts.

Moreover, children had similar feelings and predictions for siblings and others associated with lucky and unlucky individuals. In other words there was guilt (or innocence) by association.

“For millennia, human beings have believed that it is morally wrong to judge others by the fortuitous or unfortunate events that befall them or by the actions of another person.” So begins the recent article in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on the series of studies.

Yet these experiments suggest that a preference for the lucky begins at a very young age and preliminary research (not fully reported in this article) suggests that such a preference continues into adulthood, although it abates over time.

These findings might have significant implications for how we understand racial and other prejudices and how groups of people become caught in perpetuating cycles of disadvantage. The studies also imply that breaking such cycles could require efforts to redirect the preferences of the very young.

• Summary of “Judgments of the Lucky Across Development and Culture” by Kristina R. Olson, Yarrow Dunham, Carol S. Dweck, Elizabeth S. Spelke, and Mahzarin R. Banaji in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 2008, Vol. 94, No. 5, p. 757–776.

[For more about the work of Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies see The New Yorker How Elizabeth Spelke Peers into the Infant Mind [1]]