Psychologist Richard Wiseman (website(1)) appeared on Wednesday's program to discuss his eight-year study into the nature of luck. What he discovered was that essentially people make their own good or bad luck through their behaviors and beliefs. Lucky people are "out there creating opportunities for themselves," drawing people towards them with their social magnetism, Wiseman explained.

Besides opportunity, there are three other central principles that can make people luckier, Wiseman outlined:

• Intuition-- Lucky people tend to trust their gut feelings.
• Expectation-- Expecting to be lucky can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Coping with Ill Fortune-- The ability to turn unlucky events around to work in your favor.

Through these principles, we could potentially reverse engineer unlucky people, Wiseman said, who added that one of his goals was to "bring some science to the self-help industry."

Dr. Wiseman also touched on his research into areas such as humor and lying. Liars tend to use shorter sentences and longer pauses he said. Recently he conducted an online experiment with the laughlab.co.uk(2), to see whether people could tell if someone was presenting a real or fake smile in a photograph. Real smiles, he said, are detectable via the appearance of laugh lines around the eyes.

1. http://www.richardwiseman.net
2. http://www.laughlab.co.uk/home.html

Bumper Music

Bumper music from Wednesday May 28, 2003