Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

The Atlantic:

I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court.

He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.

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Experiments by David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, offer additional evidence that gratitude might lead to greater willingness to support the common good. In one widely cited study, he and his co-authors devised a clever manipulation to make a group of laboratory subjects feel grateful, and then gave them an opportunity to take actions that would benefit others at their own expense. Subjects in whom gratitude had been stoked were subsequently about 25 percent more generous toward strangers than were members of a control group. These findings are consistent with those of other academic psychologists. Taken together, the research suggests that when we are reminded of luck’s importance, we are much more likely to plow some of our own good fortune back into the common good.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic