ABSTRACT
Do you believe in luck? Odds are that you do. The notion of luck has been around for milennia, but the relationship between luck and psi has received surprisingly little attention from parapsychologists. This paper reviews previous experimental studies and describes a new experiment examining attitudes and beliefs about luck in relationship to performance in a psi task.
The experiment resulted in significant post-hoc evidence for psi (p <.04) and a surprisingly strong negative correlation between belief in luck
and psi performance (r= -.81, p < 10-5).
We speculate that the strong belief-luck relationship may be due to a confusion about two different meanings of luck. One meaning is luck as a gift beyond our control, as in being born under an auspicious star. Another meaning is luck as a favorable event that you can create through force of will. The former is presumably not related to psi, and has connotations of an irrevocable fate, whereas the latter is essentially the same as psi. Thus, different interpretations of luck may lead to different outcomes in psi experiment.