Let’s say you go to some event and they are giving away door prizes. Ever notice how some people always seem to win something while others dont?
Have you ever played a dice game like backgammon and some people consistently role more doubles or other better roles than others? (and are NOT cheating)
When fishing you see people bait, throw in their hooks, and consistently catch more fish than the person standing next to them using the exact same bait?
I swear it seems like some people are born under a 4 leaf clover or something, they just seem luckier in certain ways than others.
I’ve never met a person who is lucky in the way you’re describing. But I have met people who don’t seem to deal with strings of bad luck like other people may suffer from. But this is easy to explain. Either they don’t take a lot of risks or they surround themselves with people who don’t take a lot of risks.
These are people who react to lucky events in a more remarkable way. Without you being aware of it, their voice, body language, etc. immediately draws your attention to their win, while a lucky streak of their buddies goes unnoticed.
In a more controlled environment, like a professional poker tournament, you never see such people.
To answer the OP: it depends what you mean by lucky. If you mean do some people have many more good events outside their control happen to them? Sure. Because there is no Fairness Fairy out there to make sure all the good events get evenly distributed.
If you mean is there something “attached” to a particular person that makes them lucky, like a Luck attribute in an RPG? No, I see no reason to think this.
And anyway is it more lucky to win lots of small things throughout life, or win the state lottery once? Or be born handsome or smart?
I don’t think that explanation is necessary. There are billions of people; you would expect that purely by chance some of them would have strings of extremely good or bad luck.
Say one set is flipping a coin 10 times. It’s very unlikely that any given set will be all heads or all tails, but if you have billions of sets it would be anomalous if there weren’t any all heads or all tails results.
Sooner or later you’ve got to have one human who always wins door prizes.
At an annual event there was a raffle, and a friend kept winning prizes year after year. Everyone thought he was extremely lucky, but we just found out that he had bought a metric buttload of tickets each year.
I’m going to go with confirmation bias and hidden information as well.
Consider a wide circle of friends and family, say 100 people.
Imagine that they all put themselves in 1000 similar situations over the course of a year, perhaps playing golf, gambling etc. (the potential list is endless)
Now then, over the course of a year, just by random chance there are some in that group that are going to stand out as having had far more beneficial outcomes from those 1000 opportunities, similarly, some are going to have had far less.
It is human nature is take note of the outliers, those “unlucky” or “lucky” will stick in your mind and the middle-of-the-road masses will not.
That is all there is to it. There is no evidence of any cosmic significance to this or any magic at work. What you experience as a “lucky” person is merely a blip in the ever-levelling plateau that results from the law of large numbers. Extend the observation long enough and the “luckiness” evaporates.
That’s why casinos love to keep “lucky” winners gambling and why there is no need to fix the wheel when the odds are already 1/36th in your favour.
This game has a large element of skill to it. Maybe the player who appears lucky is simply the one who takes care to place his pieces where common dice rolls produce good results.
Another activity with an important skill component - results can be significantly affected by the way you bait the hook, where you cast to, how you react to a nibble, etc.
I’m a door prize winner, so the phenomenon does exist. It does not translate to lotto winner however. I win so often at Chamber of Commerce mixers that I no longer put my card in the bowl as it causes resentment.
In the game of Risk, have you ever seen a map-sweeping army horde get obliterated by two defending armies in Central America? Yea, that we me. I wasn’t the defender.
Or have ever seen a spearman successively defend a city against a group of tanks? (I can’t be the only one).
Yeah, backgammon is a pretty skillful game and good play will often be described as “good luck” to less skillful players. There’s a very strong backgammon game for the iPhone/iPad called Backgammon NJHD, which I believe is based on GNU backgammon. The app has a slew of complaints about the computer “cheating” and “getting lucky” with double rolls whenever it needs them. The developer got so annoyed with all the baseless accusations that you can even access a screen that gives you the random number seed for all the rolls to come in the game. That is to say, with the seed, you can see all the rolls to come. (And then to contest the complaint that the computer thus “looks ahead,” there is a “manual roll” option, where you can roll your own dice and input them manually into the computer and see it plays exactly the same in expert mode as with its internal random number generator.)
Humans have a defect where we perceive actual randomness to be less random than fake randomness.
If you ask someone to construct a fake list of 100 coin flips, it’s unlikely that they’ll put in a run of more than about 3 heads or tails in a row. But in practice a sequence that long is likely to have about 7 of the same side in a row. People perceive that as wrong but it’s just the nature of statistics.
So no, it’s just clustering, combined with confirmation bias and some other cognitive defects.
