News

Friday the 13th – lucky for anyone?

Media Release, Wednesday 11 August 2004

Anyone planning on staying indoors and rubbing a rabbit’s foot all day this Friday the 13th may be wasting their time according to a new theory of luck which says there is no point in guessing when it will occur.

Mr. Will Barrett, a Research Fellow in the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), says luck cannot be predicted and is largely beyond our capacity to influence or control.

“Just because you fell down the stairs, lost your job and broke your leg on the last three consecutive Friday the thirteenths, does not mean you will be plagued by bad luck again this year,” he says.

“Because of the nature of luck you cannot predict future luck on the basis of past luck.”

Mr. Barrett, who has also researched the impact of beliefs about luck on gambling behaviour, says that people need to be careful about trying to project luck because it is essentially just down to chance – it cannot be predicted.

However, he believes that the impact of chance can be diminished by knowledge and planning.

“For example, unless you have rigged the wheel, there is no way of knowing whether a roulette ball will land on red because we cannot alter the workings of chance. However, we can diminish the element of bad luck by betting on the basis of the known probabilities, and good luck might still go our way.”

A person may think that Friday the 13th is unlucky for them because they have experienced bad luck on that day in the past and estimate that the probability of something bad happening this year is quite high.

But, Mr. Barrett says, it is irrational to think that staying indoors or rubbing a rabbit’s foot will have any impact on the outcome of the chance events that cross their path on that day. Chance events are outside of our control.

Mr. Barrett’s research contributes to the expanding debate among philosophers on the nature and significance of luck and will soon be published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

Over the last twenty-five years philosophers have written a lot about the relationship between luck and morality, but have taken the concept of luck more or less for granted, he says.

Through attending closely to the concept of luck Mr. Barrett has developed a theory of luck in terms of what we can rationally expect. A reviewer recently wrote that Mr. Barrett’s work is “a very good contribution to the emergent debate on luck.”