Why successful people downplay the importance of luck
Motivation
In Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, Robert Frank argues that wealthy people fail to appreciate the central role that luck plays in their success. He describes the cognitive biases that prevent successful people from appreciating the role that luck has played in their lives. For example, people find it harder to motivate themselves if they believe that luck has a bigger impact on their life than hard work.
Tim Harford has written about what psychologists call the ‘headwinds / tailwinds asymmetry’, based on the idea that a cyclist never notices when the wind is at his or her back.
Danny Dorling writes about how the Moneyball author Michael Lewis explained to a group of Princeton University graduates why most of his own and his audience’s success was due to luck:
People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck – especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.
Status anxiety
Alain de Botton makes the following observation in his book Status Anxiety:
We care about our status for a simple reason: because most people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have (it is no coincidence that the first question we tend to be asked by new acquaintances is ‘What do you do?’).
Gerry Mitchell and Marcos González Hernando write in Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality:
[High earners] are anxious about downward mobility - if not for themselves, for their children… Despite their relative advantage and comfort, they worry about their income, are anxious about the future and don’t feel politically empowered.
Mitchell and Hernando also cite Piketty’s distinction between ‘merchants’, high earners whose status comes from their income, who look up towards the top 1% and see their position as earned through merit more than luck - and ‘brahmins’, highly educated members of the cultural elite who are generally more aware of their own luck, but still tend to justify their status through hard work.
Self-delusion
Research commissioned by the New Statesman in 2022 found evidence of a ‘regression towards the mean’, with most Britons on incomes well above the average and well below the average saying that they felt “normal”, “fortunate”, or “hard done by” when compared with the average UK citizen.
People at the top end of the income or wealth distribution, and with high levels of education, status and/or power, are even better than most people at filtering out facts that don’t fit their preconceived ideas. They also have poorer ‘sociological imaginations’ then people on lower incomes, according to the sociologist Daniel Edmiston.
The US social psychologist Paul Piff has carried out experiments based on rigged games of Monopoly, in which some people have more resources at the start while others have less, to demonstrate that inequality influences how people think, such that people “who are winning at the game of life — who have more money, who have more privilege, who have more power” think that they deserve all of those things, and as such are less likely to think that inequality is a problem, and to be less willing to support efforts by the state or other actors in society to do anything about it. “We translate being better off than others to being better than others - the mind makes that translation.”
How society as a whole understands luck
The impact of religious beliefs
Many religious traditions underplay the role of luck (as well as individual agency) by teaching that people’s lives are influenced by divine will, or moral causality (e.g. karma), than by chance. However, at the same time many religions teach empathy and the need for social justice; one example is the story in the Bible of the Good Samaritan. The phrase “there but for the grace of God go I” suggests an awareness that not everything in life is down to the individual. However, this doesn’t necessarily translate into a belief that society should do more to help those who are less fortunate, since it tends to be couched in terms of charity rather than justice.
The rags to riches story
People make their own luck - this is a story that is endlessly repeated. Everyone can make it if they try. The social mobility narrative puts the emphasis on individual agency. It is politically uncontentious - those on the left can support its focus on championing people from disadvantaged backgrounds, while those on the right see it as a ‘safe’ way of talking about inequality that does not challenge any of the fundamentals of the status quo. But these stories reinforce a distinction between ‘option’ and ‘brute’ luck (i.e. ‘earned’ versus ‘unearned’ luck) that harks back to Victorian ideas of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.
Pure chance
Luck is generally understood in terms of random chance, on the roulette wheel or some other scenario where there is no guiding force. Luck is therefore divorced not only from individual control but also from less random factors that are equally outside an individual’s control, such as labour or housing markets. This is luck understood as naturalism - that “positive and negative events may happen at any time, both due to random and non-random natural and artificial processes, and that even improbable events can happen by random chance”.
How qualitative and framing research can help us to understand (and shift) mindsets
Polling helps us to understand what people think, but doesn’t tell us much about why they hold those views.
We wrote in a joint article with FrameWorks UK about the ways in which opinion polling and framing research can work together to identify communications strategies to support social progress.
Opinion polls help us understand what people think and believe (and how this varies over time), while framing research provides insights into how and why people think as they do, by examining the mindsets that lie behind people's attitudes, as well as whether and how those mindsets can be changed.
Qualitative research (such as focus groups, or deliberative exercises such as citizen’s assemblies) are also very useful for understanding in more detail what people think and why, and how those views are formed and might change in the future.
Qualitative and framing research is already yielding interesting insights into mindsets and how to influence them.
For example, FrameWorks UK has shown how to frame communications to tell a more powerful story about health that can increase understanding of the role that social determinants play in people’s health, and support for action to address them. Can similar approaches be used to influence how people think about luck, and, for example, to talk about how people coping with disadvantage are not to blame for their own misfortune?
One dilemma is how to counter individualist mindsets without triggering fatalistic ones; messaging needs to speak to the positive aspects of individualism (agency and empowerment) while focusing on the systems and structures that constrain them.
FrameWorks UK’s Moving Mindsets programme is starting to track mindsets (’deep, enduring patterns of thinking that underlie surface attitudes and opinions’) around individualism, fatalism and ‘othering’ in the UK.
We want to carry out more research to better understand people’s mindsets and attitudes to luck:
- Why some people have a broader sense of luck, recognising and supporting action to tackle structural drivers of life outcomes, than others
- Whether and how people’s views are influenced by how questions of luck are framed and contextualised (such as whether talking about luck in relation to their parents or to their children, or talking about specific policies and their impacts on people’s lives rather than about abstract or general concepts, elicits different responses)
- Whether and how views about luck mediate attitudes to policies such as redistribution (i.e. whether attitudes are driven more by preferences or perceptions)
- Whether and how talking about luck is a useful way of explaining structural inequalities to individualistic and/or meritocratically minded people, and persuading those people that the causes and/or consequences of structural inequalities are unfair, and that action is needed to tackle them