On reading the article, the takeaway message seems to be that the ‘unlucky’ systematically fail to take advantage of high-expected-but-low-median value opportunities.
Actually, the article says:
Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation.
Wiseman’s use of “rational” doesn’t really mean the same thing as we use it to mean around here, of course. A full reading of the article suggests that he means something more like “cerebral” or “singularly focused”, just as by “intuition” he means openness to subconscious information.
Or to put it more simply, lucky people make use of System 1 (which can respond in parallel to a wide variety of possibilities), as well as System 2 (which is extremely narrow-focus and serial by comparison). This also offers a ready explanation for the common “intelligence equals unhappiness” meme—people who’ve highly developed their System 2 skills to the exclusion of their System 1 management/awareness skills are going to be unlucky, and thus unhappy.
Now, we could question whether System 1 is also biased towards the sort of thing you’re talking about, but a big point of the article is that unlucky people never even notice things that the lucky people do. So, it really isn’t a function of conscious payoff consideration, at least not in the newspaper and dot experiments described. There were no payoff considerations as such, even if the practical effect was one of limiting payoff opportunities by maintaining a narrow focus. There might be a correlation between those things—i.e., risk aversion might certainly encourage a person to develop S2 at the expense of S1 -- but once that commitment has been made, the person’s going to stay unlucky even if they change their mind about payoff probabilities in general. (Unless, of course, they develop the S1-management skills described in the article.)
Actually, the article says:
Wiseman’s use of “rational” doesn’t really mean the same thing as we use it to mean around here, of course. A full reading of the article suggests that he means something more like “cerebral” or “singularly focused”, just as by “intuition” he means openness to subconscious information.
Or to put it more simply, lucky people make use of System 1 (which can respond in parallel to a wide variety of possibilities), as well as System 2 (which is extremely narrow-focus and serial by comparison). This also offers a ready explanation for the common “intelligence equals unhappiness” meme—people who’ve highly developed their System 2 skills to the exclusion of their System 1 management/awareness skills are going to be unlucky, and thus unhappy.
Now, we could question whether System 1 is also biased towards the sort of thing you’re talking about, but a big point of the article is that unlucky people never even notice things that the lucky people do. So, it really isn’t a function of conscious payoff consideration, at least not in the newspaper and dot experiments described. There were no payoff considerations as such, even if the practical effect was one of limiting payoff opportunities by maintaining a narrow focus. There might be a correlation between those things—i.e., risk aversion might certainly encourage a person to develop S2 at the expense of S1 -- but once that commitment has been made, the person’s going to stay unlucky even if they change their mind about payoff probabilities in general. (Unless, of course, they develop the S1-management skills described in the article.)