Luck

Do you believe in luck? Welsh Rugby player Ben Thomas keeps his gum shield in his rugby boot, believing it brings him good luck. Tennis superstar Serena Williams ties her shoes in a specific way before matches. And Ariana Grande eats chocolate donuts before auditions. People avoid walking under ladders, hunt for four-leaf clovers, and carry charms all in the quest to bring good luck to their lives.

Is there a hidden force in the universe secretly selecting winners and losers? Do these actions increase your chance of winning a sports match or getting your dream job? Or is luck just a story that we’ve made up to explain things that happen by chance?

Born lucky

Jacqueline Woolley, a professor of developmental psychology (a scientist who studies how minds grow and change) has spent years studying what people just like you think about luck. Speaking to Science+Nature, Woolley says that luck is normally seen as “a magical force that causes good things to happen” and people believe in it from the age of four.

People have believed in luck for thousands of years and what counts as lucky and unlucky depends on your culture. Many superstitions (beliefs that are not rooted in science) help people explain the world around them. Bad events become easier to handle when you can blame bad luck.

Lucky dog

In 2011, television magician Derren Brown spread a rumour that a dog statue in a town in Yorkshire was lucky. People started queuing up to touch it. Those who believed they would become luckier really did have more good fortune, winning more games and competitions after touching the statue. But how? The answer is to do with how we think about things. Brown found that believing something was going to make you lucky generally made you more lucky.

The opposite is also true. In 1993, doctors found out that there were more traffic accidents on Friday 13th than the week before. One theory is that people drove more nervously.

Seeing is believing

Can belief change outcomes? Psychologist Richard Wiseman studied lucky and unlucky people for years and discovered that people who believed in luck generally experienced more good things. People who thought of themselves as lucky were more open to the world around them and opportunities came to them more freely.

Philosopher Neil Levy says that luck is about chance. For something to be lucky, it has to be something that could have had a different outcome like a coin flip or a dice roll. And it has to matter to you. A rugby player scoring a try, a tennis player doing really well during a serve, or an actress getting a dream role might not be luck: Those people are very skilled.

Feeling lucky?

The experts agree: Luck is not a force. Levy says luck “is not something that exists independently of ourselves like light or gravity” and Derren Brown told Science+Nature it’s “probably a story that we tell ourselves.”

You can’t change the odds of a coin flip or dice roll. But none of this makes luck powerless. Your lucky socks may not change the chance of you winning something – but they might change the way you feel or think about it. That change in mindset might bring about positive outcomes. When you believe in yourself, anything is possible.

Also

The Romans took luck very seriously. Roman boys wore a lucky charm called a bulla. Girls wore lunula. Both were amulets that supposedly gave them good luck and protection from birth until adulthood.

Romans also believed in the goddess Fortuna. She controls fate by spinning a giant wheel and is often blindfolded to show that luck is random. It’s where we get the phrase “blind luck” from. People worshipped Fortuna in temples hoping to be blessed with good luck, especially before wars. Over 2,000 years later, Fortuna’s ‘Wheel of Fortune’ – and her name – is still around. How fortunate!

First published in The Week Junior Science+Nature, issue 103, August 2026.