Good fortune: The luck of Skibbereen didn't stand up to the scrutiny of a fun scientific test, the BA Festival heard yesterday.
Skibbereen is considered the luckiest Lotto town in Ireland. Ten jackpot-winning Lotto tickets have been sold in the town, grossing over €16.4 million. This was put to the test in a light-hearted experiment. Fifty tickets were bought in Skibbereen at a newsagent that has had a staggering five Lotto wins, by Prof Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire. He then purchased 50 more tickets from a "control" shop in Dublin. Unfortunately, not a single ticket from either location won anything. "Skibbereen's luck didn't hold up in this particular occasion," he said. "The outcome of the experiment is consistent with probability theory - a lottery draw is completely random and thus tickets bought in one place should be no more successful than those purchased elsewhere," commented Prof Wiseman, "Other research suggests that some types of 'lucky' life events, such as encountering opportunities, can be influenced by the way people think and behave," he added. "If you maintain an optimistic world view, then luck can become a self-fulfilling prophecy," he said. However, Europe's only Professor of Gambling Studies, Mark Griffiths, cautioned that the sort of optimism that is likely to beneficial in ordinary life, may be a big problem for gamblers.
"Many gamblers start to consider their losses as 'near wins', explained Prof Griffiths. "For people with a problem, that sort of optimism can perpetuate the problem and be very, very negative." This risk isn't restricted to people with gambling addictions, according to Prof Wiseman. "The most dangerous example in the lotto is the people who use the same numbers every week," he said. "They get locked into the idea that if they don't buy them, then that would be the week they come up. This is a very common belief and an incredibly dangerous one, because it locks them into playing every week," he continued.
The festival also heard in this session, called "Do you feel lucky"? about the many superstitions held by fisherman. Dr Bairbre Ní Fhloinn from University College Dublin began her research after a chance conversation with a friend who spent some time as a fisherman. "He said that however heated the argument got, and however foul the language became, one word that was never used was 'pig'," said Dr Ní Fhloinn. "This sparked a certain curiosity in me." When she researched further, she was surprised to discover that these types of superstitions were particularly prevalent among "the professional, relatively well-educated fisherman working from state-of-the-art trawlers," she said.
This contrasted with the stereotyped notion of the typical tradition bearer, such as an older man in the west of Ireland who may be fishing lobster for a few months a year, said Dr Ní Fhloinn. She suggested that these modern fishermen relied more on the superstitions due to the vastly greater capital and financial investment that was reliant in the success of their industry, she said. "It seemed to be that, in economic terms, the higher you went, the harder you fell," she explained. The fisherman often felt it was better to be on the safe side, she said.
Dr Vikki Burns is a research scientist at The University of Birmingham and is on placement at The Irish Times as a Media Fellow for the British Association for the Advancement of Science.