What Are the Chances? by Barbara Blatchley (chapter 1)

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?

BARBARA BLATCHLEY is a professor

of psychology and neuroscience at Agnes Scott College. Her research focuses on auditory sensory physiology, and she is the author of Statistics in Context (2018).

—David Hand, emeritus professor of mathematics and senior research investigator, Imperial College London, and author of The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“What Are the Chances? provides intriguing insights into the neuroscientific and psychological underpinnings of how we perceive luck and chance. Such errors of probability judgments are often systematic rather than random. They may arise from misapplication of heuristics that originally were useful shortcuts. A worthwhile read.”

—V. S. Ramachandran, author of The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human

“Who among us does not speak of luck? Good luck, bad luck, cross your fingers, lucky charms? And yet few among us have any real understanding of what it means to be lucky or unlucky. This book provides an excellent examination of just what luck is, presented in a manner that entertains as it explains. It is a most enjoyable and informative read, and one that I highly recommend.”

—James E. Alcock, professor emeritus, York University, and author of Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling $27.95

Jacket design: Alex Camlin

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York cup.columbia.edu

M

WHAT ARE

WHAT ARE TH E C HAN C ES?

Christopher Robinson McRae

“Barbara Blatchley provides a colorful and accessible look at the fascinating nature of luck. Focusing on the human side as well as the neuroscientific and psychological aspects, she explores what luck is and the role luck plays in our lives.”

B L ATC H L EY

Praise for

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TH E CHANCES ?

WHY WE B ELI EVE I N LU C K BARBAR A B L ATC H L EY

COLUMBIA

ost of us, no matter how rational we think we are, have a lucky charm, a good-luck ritual, or some other custom we follow in the hope that it will lead to a good result. Is the idea of luckiness just a way in which we try to impose order on chaos?

Do we live in a world of flukes and coincidences, good and bad breaks, with outcomes as random as a roll of the dice—or can our beliefs help change our luck?

What Are the Chances? reveals how psychology and neuroscience explain the significance of the idea of luck. Barbara Blatchley explores how people react to random events in a range of circumstances, examining the evidence that the belief in luck helps us cope with a lack of control.

She tells the stories of lucky and unlucky people—who won the lottery multiple times, survived seven brushes with death, or found an apparently cursed Neanderthal mummy—as well as the accidental discoveries that fundamentally changed what we know about the brain. Blatchley considers our frequent misunderstanding of randomness, the history of luckiness in different cultures and religions, the surprising benefits of magical thinking, and many other topics. Offering a new view of how the brain handles the unexpected, What Are the Chances? shows why an arguably irrational belief can—fingers crossed—help us as we struggle with an unpredictable world.

1

WHAT IS LUCK?

Luck is not chance— It’s Toil— Fortune’s expensive smile Is earned— The Father of the Mine Is that old-fashioned Coin We spurned— EMILY DICKINSON, POEM #1350

LUCK AND THE HIGH SEAS This book is about luck. We all know what luck means for us personally, but, as they say, “one person’s ceiling is another person’s floor”—it might just depend on your perspective. What’s lucky for you can be completely different for the person standing next to you. So let’s start with a question: What exactly is luck? Is it plain old hard work, as Emily Dickinson suggests, or is it random chance reaching out to smack you in the face or lift you into a new tax bracket? Can something be both good and bad luck at

2 What Is Luck?

the same time? Perhaps a story will illuminate the answer. Let’s take a look at what happened to Sarah Kessans and Emily Kohl.

In 2005 these two young women entered the Woodvale Events Transatlantic Rowing Race, billed as the toughest rowing race in the world. The competition involves rowing a boat across the Atlantic Ocean. Sarah Kessans very graciously agreed to let me interview her about her adventures at sea. My first question to her was, “What possessed you to consider rowing a tiny, twentyfour-foot boat across the enormous Atlantic?” Her reply was straightforward.

I fell completely in love with the sport of rowing from my first

strokes on the Wabash River during my freshman year at Purdue. . . .

As I was returning from a trip to London, I stopped in a bookshop

on Oxford Street to find something to read on the flight home.

I picked up Debra Veal’s Rowing It Alone and nearly had it read by

the time I touched down in Chicago. I was hooked. Ocean rowing

was everything I loved about rowing, plus an absolutely incredible

adventure . . . and fortunately there was someone as crazy as I was [her racing partner, Emily Kohl] on the Purdue rowing team!1

The race begins in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and ends in Antigua, almost three thousand miles with a whole lot of nothing but wide and empty water in between. Sarah and Emily were hoping to break the women’s world record for rowing a “double” across a major portion of the Atlantic Ocean.2 A “double” is a small but very specialized rowboat. There’s a tiny, one-person-at-a-time cabin at the stern of the boat and an even smaller storage locker at the bow, two rowing positions, and not much else. The boat is so small that rowers have to trade off lying down in the cabin; one person rows while the other sleeps, or tries to, in the narrow, cramped quarters.

What Is Luck? 3

Sarah and Emily named their twenty-four-foot-long six-footwide vessel American Fire and trained like mad throughout the spring and summer of 2005 in preparation for the race. Both had been members of the Purdue University rowing team, so they had lots of experience with distance rowing. The Purdue University Boilermakers make their home in West Lafayette, Indiana, about sixty miles northwest of Indianapolis. The campus is surrounded by waving seas of corn and soybeans, but there is not much in the way of open ocean of any description.

Both young women knew that ocean training was essential, so in the summer of 2005, Emily and Sarah moved themselves and their boat to Florida to train on the Intracoastal Waterway.

They rowed back and forth between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, building their stamina for the fifty- to sixty-mile days of rowing they wanted to log during the race itself.

The race began with what could be interpreted as a bad omen—a sign that bad luck and difficult circumstances were on the way. The race was scheduled to begin November 27, 2005, taking advantage of what usually is the end of hurricane season in the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the 2005 season was the most active in recorded history, cataloging so many storms (including the infamous hurricane Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast) that forecasters used up all the names on the official list and had to use Greek letter names for the last six storms of the season.

The racers finally left tiny La Gomera in the Canary Islands on November 30 and quickly encountered unusually strong winds, very high seas, and extremely difficult rowing conditions. Hurricane Epsilon, a strange, late-in-the-season storm was churning the seas and began to move eastward December 1, 2005.3 Many rowers had to stop rowing altogether and throw out their sea anchors (large parachute-shaped bags deployed to catch water and hold the boat in place) to keep their small rowboats from

4 What Is Luck?

being blown backward in the strong winds. When able to move westward again, the rowers passed through the southern edge of Tropical Storm Zeta and into even more difficult conditions.

After a month and a half of nonstop daily rowing and battling the seas, on January 15 conditions became so bad that the crew of American Fire was forced once again to set their sea anchor and wait. Part of the steering mechanism on their boat had snapped, and they needed calmer water in which to work to reattach it.

The horrendous weather drove both Sarah and Emily into the cabin, and the small space quickly grew stifling. They turned on the ventilation system, confident that the design of the vents would keep water from the large waves crashing over the boat outside the cabin.

At about 2:30 p.m., Sarah says they had radioed the Aurora, the closer of the two support vessels for the racers—a mere three hundred miles ahead of American Fire (the other support vessel, the Sula, was six hundred miles behind them). In a brief conversation, they advised the crew of the bad weather and their forced stop.

At that time, the Aurora had their hands full rescuing another boat that had capsized earlier in the day. Around 4:30 p.m., Emily had the radio in her hand to call Aurora again when the worst possible thing that could happen, happened—a large rogue wave slammed into the port side of the boat (that’s the left side for all us landlubbers), rolling the boat completely over. Water was now rushing into the cabin through the still-open vents.

They were in big trouble now. Water was filling the boat, they were unable to stop it, and the boat was upside down in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of the winter, in horrid weather. Sarah reached the hatch just in time to see that the wave had snapped the lines holding their life raft. She watched the life raft disappear between the waves, and along with it went their survival gear. Both women struggled to get clear of the

What Is Luck? 5

waterlogged debris and wreckage that made movement inside the cabin almost impossible.

Emerging from the cabin, Emily and Sarah clambered on top of the upturned boat, hoping against hope that they would be able to see the life raft nearby. No such luck. They managed to clip themselves together and tie themselves to the boat. They had a sleeping bag that Sarah had grabbed on the way out of the cabin, and an emergency position indicating radio beacon (EPIRB), which Sarah had also managed to snag as she escaped from the rapidly flooding cabin. They held on to each other, the EPIRB, and the boat and waited, keeping morale up and hopes high by telling jokes and singing songs—anything to keep their minds occupied and focused on something, anything, other than their desperate predicament.4 Sixteen hours later, the tall ship Stavros S. Niarchos, sailing from the Canary Islands to Antigua, came into view. The Stavros had been in the general vicinity (it was more than one hundred miles away, but when you’re in the middle of the Atlantic, at night, tied to the bottom of your very small boat, one hundred miles away is nearby) and had been asked by the U.S. Coast Guard, which had received the EPIRB’s emergency signal, to try to find and rescue the women. Interviewed in Antigua after the Stavros sailed into port, Sarah admitted that she and Emily were very lucky, and I suppose that most of us would agree.5 Capsizing in the middle of the ocean with no supplies, no life boat, and only the hope that someone heard your emergency signal is about as nightmarish as it gets.

Surviving unscathed is indeed lucky. Sarah explained the role luck had played in the 2005 race this way: There were so many variables that led up to the capsize, both good and bad, and I’d have to say that both preparation and

6 What Is Luck?

random chance played key roles in the final outcome. . . . That

said, it is hard to prepare for every possible condition that nature can throw at you—had we known that a rogue wave was going

to hit we would have kept the inner caps to our ventilating fans locked shut (which would have kept water out of the cabin and could have allowed the boat to self-right as designed). Had we

known the violence of rogue waves, we would have found a better

way to lash down our life raft and emergency grab bag on deck.

Had we known that the hurricane season would extend all the way through mid-January, Woodvale might have postponed or

canceled the race. But, as much bad luck as we had out there, we definitely had some good luck—we had each other and a boat that

stayed afloat, and while all the rest of the crews were rescued by

either the support yachts or carriers (crowded and not much fun), we had the good fortune to be rescued by a tall ship headed for the Caribbean.6

After reading this remarkable story, I found myself thinking about their luck. Consider the conditions they encountered.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reports that waves up to twenty-three feet in height are fairly common in a storm on the open ocean, and in extreme conditions, waves of fifty feet in height have been noted.7 The rowboat was only twenty-four feet in length, the same size as just a biggish wave. A rogue wave is abnormally large and looks like a wall of water. (Folktales talk of freak waves ninety-eight feet tall— the height of a ten-story building.) These waves appear without warning and move against the prevailing wave direction. It was very bad luck indeed for the American Fire to be struck by one of these monsters. Compounding their bad luck was the fact that the life raft, carrying their survival gear, floated away in the aftermath of capsizing.

What Is Luck? 7

On the positive side, it was good luck that they managed to grab the emergency beacon before getting out of the cabin and, as Sarah points out, good luck that their little boat stayed afloat, even full of water. Good luck also that they had each other to count on and were not rowing a “single,” all alone on the ocean when disaster struck. It was also good luck that they were able to keep each other’s spirits up through the long night of waiting and hoping for rescue.

Other aspects of their adventure don’t fit so neatly into the good luck versus bad luck dichotomy. Was it good luck that the boat was designed to right itself in the event of a capsize, or bad luck that the air vents had been opened, allowing the cabin to flood while sitting at anchor waiting for the weather to clear?

Was it good luck that both women just happened to be in the cabin at the same time when the wave hit so no one got swept away, or bad luck that the additional weight of both crew members in a cabin designed for just one person might have prevented self-righting even if the vents had been closed? Can the same event be both good luck and bad luck? Just what is luck, anyway?

Each of us has our own definition of luck and our own beliefs about how luck operates. To the scientists who study it, luck is a category of causation used to explain success or failure when the outcome doesn’t seem to be the result of our own abilities or effort. When we evaluate what happened, we use all of the information available in an effort to understand what caused that event. We refer to our prior experiences (consult our memory), we draw on immediate sensory information (what our sensory systems tell us is happening), and we consult our dreams and desires, our expectations of what should happen and the course we really want events to take. We use all of this information in our innate drive to determine what happened and to identify the cause of the event.

8 What Is Luck?

Events are often the result of our own effort (or lack of effort as the case may be), and we know deep down that what we did or did not do was the root cause of those events. But when effort seems to have no effect at all—when an event just happens outside the limits of our control—we say that it is luck. The rogue wave that flipped the American Fire was uncontrollable and completely independent of the preparations Emily and Sarah had made. In fact, Sarah said that both she and Emily and their support crew on shore believed that the American Fire team was as well prepared as they could be, perhaps even better prepared than some of the other teams. Despite their two years of hard work and training, Sarah noted that “the ocean doesn’t really care how prepared you are.”8 They had no control over some events and could not possibly have gained control over these events no matter how hard or how long they trained. That rogue wave was just plain bad luck.

WHAT IS LUCK? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says that the word luck came to English from the German word luk, or gelucke, meaning both “happiness” and “luck.”9 The term was first used by gamblers, but it eventually seeped into general usage. The OED lists several meanings for “luck.” First, luck is “the fortuitous happening of events, favorable or unfavorable, to the interests of a person.” Second, luck is “good fortune, success, prosperity, or advantage coming by chance, rather than as a consequence of merit or effort.” The word “fortuitous” refers to something that happens accidentally, or purely by chance. So the expression “a lucky accident” is redundant—the idea that the “lucky” event is “accidental” is in its very definition. That chance event can work

What Is Luck? 9

to my advantage (in which case it is good luck for me) or to my disadvantage (bad luck).

The second OED definition expands on the idea of chance— luck is outside our control, not linked to our effort or to whether we deserve it. Lucky events are random; they occur by chance, regardless of whether or not we’ve prepared or trained for them or want them to happen. However, when we think about random events, most of us run into trouble.

RANDOMNESS From a scientific perspective, randomness is, quite literally, unpredictable. For example, a mathematician would explain random numbers as a sequence of numbers in which any number is “equally likely to be picked next” and where it is “impossible to predict” the next number based on the numbers already picked.10 Mathematical definitions of randomness rely heavily on the idea that it is the process of selection—not the outcome—that is random. One random event may look just like another event, but this outcome is not significant as long as the selection process was random.

Humans have very distinct ideas about what random ought to look like, and we tend to look at the outcome rather than at the process. This tendency can get us into trouble. Suppose I tossed a coin ten times and it landed on tails three times and on heads seven times—is there something wrong with my coin?

Many people, looking at this result, would assume that my coin is biased—heads are turning up more often than they should if I tossed a “fair” coin. The problem is that this is not a biased coin (my right hand to God, I took a penny out of my jar of pennies and tossed it ten times in a row). Through random chance my coin landed on heads more often than tails.

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?

BARBARA BLATCHLEY is a professor

of psychology and neuroscience at Agnes Scott College. Her research focuses on auditory sensory physiology, and she is the author of Statistics in Context (2018).

—David Hand, emeritus professor of mathematics and senior research investigator, Imperial College London, and author of The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“What Are the Chances? provides intriguing insights into the neuroscientific and psychological underpinnings of how we perceive luck and chance. Such errors of probability judgments are often systematic rather than random. They may arise from misapplication of heuristics that originally were useful shortcuts. A worthwhile read.”

—V. S. Ramachandran, author of The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human

“Who among us does not speak of luck? Good luck, bad luck, cross your fingers, lucky charms? And yet few among us have any real understanding of what it means to be lucky or unlucky. This book provides an excellent examination of just what luck is, presented in a manner that entertains as it explains. It is a most enjoyable and informative read, and one that I highly recommend.”

—James E. Alcock, professor emeritus, York University, and author of Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling $27.95

Jacket design: Alex Camlin

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York cup.columbia.edu

M

WHAT ARE

WHAT ARE TH E C HAN C ES?

Christopher Robinson McRae

“Barbara Blatchley provides a colorful and accessible look at the fascinating nature of luck. Focusing on the human side as well as the neuroscientific and psychological aspects, she explores what luck is and the role luck plays in our lives.”

B L ATC H L EY

Praise for

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TH E CHANCES ?

WHY WE B ELI EVE I N LU C K BARBAR A B L ATC H L EY

COLUMBIA

ost of us, no matter how rational we think we are, have a lucky charm, a good-luck ritual, or some other custom we follow in the hope that it will lead to a good result. Is the idea of luckiness just a way in which we try to impose order on chaos?

Do we live in a world of flukes and coincidences, good and bad breaks, with outcomes as random as a roll of the dice—or can our beliefs help change our luck?

What Are the Chances? reveals how psychology and neuroscience explain the significance of the idea of luck. Barbara Blatchley explores how people react to random events in a range of circumstances, examining the evidence that the belief in luck helps us cope with a lack of control.

She tells the stories of lucky and unlucky people—who won the lottery multiple times, survived seven brushes with death, or found an apparently cursed Neanderthal mummy—as well as the accidental discoveries that fundamentally changed what we know about the brain. Blatchley considers our frequent misunderstanding of randomness, the history of luckiness in different cultures and religions, the surprising benefits of magical thinking, and many other topics. Offering a new view of how the brain handles the unexpected, What Are the Chances? shows why an arguably irrational belief can—fingers crossed—help us as we struggle with an unpredictable world.