I couldn’t have said it better than this.

In “Order in Choice: Effects of Serial Position on Preferences,” researchers wanted to test, when presented with a series of objects, how much the order influences our selection. In other words: are we biased towards the things we see early on, or things we see at the end?

Let’s say you’re an unemployed war veteran living with your father. You want to run for Senate, but you’ve got no platform, no public speaking or communicative savvy, no website, and no money. How do you win?

“I think he benefited simply because his name was first on the ballot. I talked to a lot of people, and a lot of people voted for him. They can’t tell me why,” said S.C. state representative Todd Rutherford. (Alvin Greene was running against Victor Rawl.)

Let’s conveniently ignore the Big Questions—why was he on the ballot, was there any tampering with the voting tallies, and how did an unemployed guy get the $10440 filing fee to appear on the ballot in the first place?—and focus on this fact: he won.

Jon Stewart even quipped, “Ah-ha! The scoundrel here appears to be the alphabet. I look forward to meeting your next governor, Aaron A. Aardvark.”

The wine study handily confirmed that whether they’re presented with two, three, four, or five different kinds of wine, people choose the first in a series.

How do we know that the study wasn’t skewed by a superior wine in the first position? Because test subjects were either given two, three, four, or five glasses of the exact same kind of wine. The exception to this primary effect: people who got high marks on the wine knowledge test given prior to the study favored the last glass of wine when offered five, demonstrating a recency effect.

The researchers speculate that the other subjects were “more likely to be overwhelmed by the cognitive demands” of evaluating each new wine against their current favorite; they just went with the wine that made the first and biggest splash on them: the first. Nonexperts are more likely to be satisficers, content to simply choose whichever fit the bill, and then stick by their choice. Because they either don’t care about the differences, or simply don’t know enough about the differences, when people are confronted with a choice between fairly similar things—and they’re not particularly experts—they really do pick the first one.

“Luck is probability taken personally.” -Anon.
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” -Seneca
“Those who have succeeded at anything and don’t mention luck are kidding themselves.” -Larry King
“I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?” -Jean Cocteau

Of the myriad ways to examine luck, some psychologists qualify it as a belief of stable, as when someone claims that he’s not a lucky person.

Perceptions of being lucky [are] associated with better mental health, while perceptions of being unlucky are associated with poorer mental health…. [The] belief in being lucky is associated with openness, lower levels of irrational beliefs, more positive thinking and better psychological and subjective well-being is consistent with the distinction within the literature that perceptions of being lucky may be adaptive and perceptions of being unlucky may be maladaptive.

Because a belief in luck as a stable, personal characteristic is related to increased goal-oriented behavior, in many ways, believing that you’re lucky is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The lucky person is more likely to persevere until they succeed; and then, we can guess, attribute the success to luck, rather than their increased effort.

On the other hand, overestimating your luck leads to underestimating the odds of failure. We see this in overly confident business decisions (the last decade of GM comes to mind), as well as that scene in every ’80s movie in which the so-called alpha male hits on, and is then publicly rejected, by, some blonde. The idea of locus of control, or how much control we believe we have over events, is key.

If you’re an “internal,” you’re more likely to hold yourself responsible, even if you had nothing to do with your cat’s hernia, the BP Oil Disaster, or how many times your numbers/colors didn’t come up in bingo/lotto/roulette/craps.
If you’re an “external,” you’re more likely to understand the statement: “Yes, I’ve been divorced seven times and been fired from every job I’ve had—but I had nothing to do with any of those things. My life, it’s just been a streak of bad luck.”

Repeat after me:
•Believing that you are lucky. Done in moderation: increased confidence, perseverance
•Believing that you are lucky. Done in excess: if you are a corporation, the government will bail you out. If you are a person, you’d be fortunate to avoid either bankruptcy or working on Wall Street.
•Believing that you have no control over events, that life is utterly random: related to higher levels of neuroticism, lower levels of self-esteem. Likely to agree with the statement, “but why bother?”
•Believing that you do have control over events: related to higher academic achievement, and higher levels of frustration.
•Moderation: as in all things, highly recommended.

Finally! It’s been a few days a week since I finally bought karlastarr.net, in anticipation for my new project. This is very blatantly inspired by various things I was reading last week, more or less simultaneously: Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, and John Mayer’s Twitter page. I pray that this is the only time in history those things have been combined in any fashion. (In the past few weeks, I’ve also: listened to everything of David Sedaris’s, including The SantaLand Diaries, finished Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, and been thinking about life in general. I’m deep like that rethinking everything I know because of an impending birthday.)

Here’s the gist of what I want to know:

• How much of luck is truly random?
• Are some people are consistently luckier than others? Can’t we learn from them?
• How can we use or manipulate the laws of probability and randomness in our everyday lives?
• Can I increase my own luck? How?

There’s not as much written on luck as there is on, say, happiness, largely because of the very definition itself:
“the force that causes things, especially good things, to happen to you by chance and not as a result of your own efforts or abilities” (Cambridge International Dictionary of English)

I usually define it as probability interpreted personally, an unexpected or unforeseen beneficial occurrence; the kind of thing you can’t plan, which seems outside of your control. (Notice that the pushy American in me is already looking to manipulate this.)

According to a study just published in Psychological Science:

Students who were told they would receive feedback quickly on their performance earned higher grades than students who expected feedback at a later time… Furthermore, when students expected to receive their grades quickly, they predicted that their performance would be worse than students who were to receive feedback later. This pattern suggests that anticipating rapid feedback may improve performance because the threat of disappointment is more prominent. As the authors note, “People do best precisely when their predictions about their own performance are least optimistic.”

People with less optimistic points of view are, in general, more likely to have realistic ideas about their performance. Apparently, the boost in performance itself can partially be explained by the imminent threat of disappointment. Time discounting, which makes us value a $100 gift certificate we’d receive today more than a $150 gift certificate we’d get in a few months, may be to blame. The eventual threat of disappointing grades or feedback doesn’t carry the same emotional impact.

However, if you want a quick creative boost, go ahead and think about yourself in the future: specifically, think about what your life will be like a year into the future. This kind of psychological distance enables people to think in abstract terms more easily.

Of course, these aren’t really opposites. So since I’m off to do some creative work that I want to be judged kindly, I’m going to envision myself in a Jetsons-era house, writing something that will be commented on immediately. Some sort of electronic mechanism I could use so that people could see my words right away. That’ll be the day!

I’ve been reacquainting myself with Photoshop lately, that great application that lets you and Fox News do creepy things like this (a manipulated photo of a reporter at the New York Times) and it begs to be said: it’s so easy to manipulate a photo. I, who am unable to draw a straight line with a ruler, could have made Jacques Steinberg look even uglier; hell, with Adobe’s infamous “charisma filter,” you can give Obama the impression of being quite similar to Rush Limbaugh.

I have a few photographer friends, and they’re constantly tweaking their photos, post-production, aiming for aesthetic excellence. Some of these revisions are technical, like changing the color levels to more clearly see a face, or cropping out unwanted scenery. But how much of a photo do you have to change to bend the truth? After the New York Times got wind that Edgar Martins, a Portuguese photojournalist they’d hired to document halted construction projects, had digitally altered the photos, they took them down. You can still see his unnatural love of symmetry here, here and here; there’s a great discussion of it all on Metafilter.

I applaud the New York Times for its decision, but can’t help but wonder about all of the photos that fall through the cracks: journalists are notorious watchdogs of other journalists, but rarely do any trained eyes with a public format scrutinize visual media in such a way; when they do, we find out about Reese Witherspoon’s changing face, not photos of everyday events. But why would anyone accept a photograph that’s been altered at all, and why does that seem so much less heinous than altered quotes or statistics?

Ubiquitous photos and videos have made people demand them (it’s the “I call BS unless you give me photos” syndrome), but most people don’t seem to realize how easy it is to alter them. And how quickly we form first impressions: we only need to see a face for 100 milliseconds before drawing a conclusion about it, and our first impressions are overgeneralized, even though we know we shouldn’t. Is there any hope for us at all?

How can we maximize our happiness this summer? As Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich have demonstrated in numerous studies, including “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question” (pdf available here), experiences provide people with more happiness than things.

“The things we own deteriorate over time, and we habituate to them quickly,” Van Boven told me last year. Later, we’re not left with the initial rush we get from driving out of the lot of the BMW dealership, but with the reality of its poor mileage, obsessing over its care, getting the transmission replaced, and worrying about it getting stolen. Memories from the end, thanks to a cognitive quirk known as recency effect, are especially prone to standing out.

What makes experiences so much better–or why should you go on vacation instead of getting a new car? For one, memories of static events “age like fine wine,” and are later open to positive reinterpretation.

Large events like trips can change lives; moments are a meaningful part of our identity. We tend to reminisce about our trips in Tahiti, not expensive watches.

Most importantly, experiences contribute to relationships, and quality of our relationships is the number one predictor of happiness. Goods we buy can isolate us. Having a car means you never get to meet anyone on the bus; having your own exercise bike means you never meet anyone at the gym or the park. Special memories are made of moments. A flat screen TV in itself is no good; inviting friends over and having a party for the game is what makes it great. You don’t bond over clothes, you bond over browsing for clothes with a friend, or going to someone’s house to borrow something.

It’s true that there’s gray area; some goods, like a bicycle, you get to have experiences. If the goal is to ride your bike rather than show it off, any bike will do. In the example above, a cheap fishing pole would do just as nicely. The key is getting to the lake in the first place.

Recently, the State Department altered its estimate of how many passports it will be issuing in 2009; in December, fiscal year 2009 seemed poised to grant 17 million passports. Now, it’ll be lucky to hit 12 million. A recent poll conducted by Allstate found that this year, nearly half of all Americans are reducing their travel plans.

In hard times, the first thing to go is actually the most important: a vacation. Though traveling has long been seen as a frivolous venture ripe with classist guilt, it’s been proven to decrease stress levels, act as a buffer against illness, increase sense of self-efficacy, and change perspectives.

A 2007 study from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (“The Recovery Experience Questionnaire”) found that of the four classifications that the researchers used to quantify recovery from burn-out—psychological detachment from work, relaxation, mastery, and control—psychological detachment from work “might be the most relevant recovery experience.”

Why is getting away from work so important? Because, as science has proven since 1986, as anecdotes have shown since the advent of the family getaway, and as stated in the very definition, a vacation forces us to spend lots of time with non-work areas of our life. Other life domains such as family and leisure life gain salience; if iPhones can be turned off momentarily, we begin to realize that our cubicles and nameplates may not be everything. And many of the small joys or transcendent experiences of a vacation often revolve around small things experienced anew: walks in nature, lots of unstressed time to play, leisurely card games, going to sleep without setting the alarm. “A Vacation from Work,” by John W. Lounsbury and Linda L. Hoopes (download here), puts it best: “Life satisfaction… showed a significant increase after a vacation.”