Lucky You, Reading This

This could be your lucky day, if you’re alert and optimistic while reading this editorial. Lucky for us that Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at Britain’s University of Hertfordshire, is running a massive study of luck. Luckily, he’s discovered some fascinating things. People born in May -- wait, that’s this month! -- are the luckiest of all people. At least they see themselves that way. And those losers born in October see themselves as the unluckiest.

Wiseman, who split the difference and was born in September, strongly suspects now that the element of pure chance has much less to do with good or bad luck in later life than people’s birth season -- and the parents’ matching mental attitudes, communicated to their infant in the first few months of life. If confirmed in further study, this will be an unpopular concept in the United States, where, as luck would have it, blaming luck on mental attitudes means you’re largely responsible for your own luck, either way. So much for blaming bosses, enemies, spouses, government, et al.

Through his research website -- www.luckfactor.co.uk -- Wiseman has so far surveyed more than 40,000 people on their birth dates and self-perceived luck. The psychologist, who has superb luck in getting on British TV and talking about luck, theorizes that humanity’s innate optimism over the warmth, promise and sunshine of spring is somehow communicated by parents to April, May and June newborns as a positive attitude. And the impending gloom of mid-autumn, auguring gray skies, colder temperatures and looming holiday visits by too many relatives, also gets downloaded onto new babies’ vacant hard drives.

Remember that childhood coach who kept saying, “You make your own luck”? The coach may have been correct again. An October-born man could walk through a parking lot so depressed over bad luck at work that he misses the $20 bill blowing by his feet. His May-born wife following behind spots the money and celebrates her latest good luck, actually determined years before. The husband silently supplements his mental list of bad-luck incidents.

Wiseman has tips for finding good luck: Relaxed luckies notice and act on good-luck chances. Lucky people listen to intuition, rather than blame it. Luckies are certain that good fortune is coming, so they see it; unluckies believe bad luck always finds them, so it does. Even when lucky people experience misfortunes, they turn a minus into a plus, imagining how much worse it could have been. Same goes for the lucky ones reading so far down this page.