Chapter 12 Further Reading: The Lucky Personality

Primary Sources

Wiseman, R. (2003). The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life — The Four Essential Principles. Miramax Books. The foundational text for this chapter. Wiseman synthesizes his decade of research for a general audience, combining the experimental findings with practical guidance. Highly readable; the methodology sections provide more detail than most popular science books. Essential reading for anyone who wants to go beyond the chapter summary.

Wiseman, R. (1997). Heads I Win, Tails It's Chance: The Psychology of the Paranormal. Prentice Hall. An earlier work in which Wiseman begins developing his framework for studying luck, framed partly through the lens of paranormal belief. The research on why people attribute outcomes to supernatural causes overlaps significantly with luck attribution research.

Wiseman, R. (2009). 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute. Macmillan. A broader application of behavior-change psychology that includes substantial material on luck, positive expectation, and resilience. Useful for seeing how the luck research fits into a larger psychological framework.

Personality and the Big Five

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1997). Personality trait structure as a human universal. American Psychologist, 52(5), 509–516. The canonical paper on the cross-cultural robustness of the Big Five personality dimensions. Understanding the Big Five — particularly openness to experience — is essential for the neuroscience of luck discussed in this chapter.

DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880–896. A more refined analysis of Big Five structure. Particularly relevant: the distinction between openness (intellectual exploration) and experiential openness, both of which contribute to luck-prone behavior patterns through different mechanisms.

DeYoung, C. G., Hirsh, J. B., Shane, M. S., Papademetris, X., Rajeevan, N., & Gray, J. R. (2010). Testing predictions from personality neuroscience: Brain structure and the Big Five. Psychological Science, 21(6), 820–828. Neuroimaging study connecting Big Five dimensions to brain structure. The openness-dopamine connection and neural noise discussed in this chapter draws on this and related work.

Attention and Luck

Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059–1074. The famous "invisible gorilla" study, demonstrating that focused attention causes dramatic failures to notice unexpected stimuli. Directly relevant to understanding why task-focused (unlucky) people miss peripheral opportunity signals. Available in full text at vislab.com.

Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional Blindness. MIT Press. The comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon underlying Wiseman's newspaper experiment finding. Explains the conditions under which people fail to see things that are in plain sight — a direct mechanism for missing lucky opportunities.

Ball, K. K., Beard, B. L., Roenker, D. L., Miller, R. L., & Griggs, D. S. (1988). Age and visual search: Expanding the useful field of view. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 5(12), 2210–2219. Original research on the useful field of view concept. While focused on aging, the baseline UFOV measurements are useful context for the chapter's discussion of peripheral attentional scope.

Social Behavior and Luck

Gladwell, M. (2000). The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Little, Brown. While not a primary research source, Gladwell's treatment of "Connectors" — people who know everyone and create connections between others — maps onto the lucky person's social profile. The chapter on connectors is most directly relevant.

Pentland, A. (2014). Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter. Penguin Press. A data-science perspective on how social interaction patterns predict career outcomes, idea quality, and organizational performance. Pentland's research using sociometric badges to track real-time social behavior provides a quantitative complement to Wiseman's observational methods.

Vergauwe, J., Wille, B., Hofmans, J., Kaiser, R. B., & De Fruyt, F. (2018). The double-edged sword of leader charisma. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(1), 110–130. An example of the nuanced research on social behavior and outcomes: charisma helps up to a point, then creates problems. Relevant to the question of whether "more social engagement" is always better or whether quality matters as much as quantity.

Intuition and Decision-Making

Gigerenzer, G. (2007). Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. Viking. The strongest academic defense of fast, intuitive thinking as a genuinely intelligent process — not a bias to be overcome. Gigerenzer argues that in uncertain, complex environments, fast-and-frugal heuristics outperform deliberate analysis. Directly relevant to Wiseman's intuition principle.

Klein, G. (1998). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press. Klein's naturalistic decision-making research with firefighters, nurses, and military commanders shows how expert intuition works in high-stakes contexts. The mechanism — rapid pattern matching against experiential databases — is precisely the intuition mechanism described in this chapter.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Essential context for the intuition discussion. Kahneman's System 1/System 2 framework provides the vocabulary for understanding when intuitive thinking is trustworthy (expert domain, adequate feedback) and when it is not. The tension between Kahneman and Gigerenzer on intuition reliability is genuinely productive for the luck question.

Resilience and Post-Traumatic Growth

Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455–471. The original publication introducing the post-traumatic growth concept and measurement instrument. The phenomenon — that adversity can produce genuine growth rather than only damage — is fundamental to Wiseman's resilience principle.

Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (2012). Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges. Cambridge University Press. A comprehensive, research-grounded treatment of resilience. The ten resilience factors identified by Southwick and Charney overlap substantially with Wiseman's fourth principle and provide a richer framework for understanding what "turning bad luck into good" actually requires.

Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press. The classic work on meaning-making in extreme adversity. While not experimental psychology, Frankl's phenomenological account of resilience under extreme conditions provides essential philosophical grounding for why resilience is a learnable skill and not merely a character given.

Body Language and Social Interaction

Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent Messages. Wadsworth. The foundational research on nonverbal communication. While the oft-cited "7-38-55 rule" is frequently misapplied, Mehrabian's broader findings on the role of posture, gesture, and gaze in social communication are directly relevant to the body language research discussed in this chapter.

Cuddy, A. J. C. (2015). Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. Little, Brown. A popular-science treatment of body language research, focused specifically on the relationship between posture and psychological state. While the "power posing" research has been subject to replication challenges, the broader framework of embodied cognition — that body affects mind as well as mind affecting body — remains well-supported.

Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363–1368. The original power posing paper, included for completeness. Note: the hormonal findings have not replicated reliably, but the behavioral and self-report findings are more robust. Reading this alongside the replication attempts is a good exercise in how scientific findings evolve.

The Luck School in Context

Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111–131. The "happiness pie chart" paper, arguing that approximately 40% of subjective well-being is within personal control through intentional activities. Provides context for understanding what Wiseman's luck school was actually doing — not changing traits, but changing intentional behavioral activities.

Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2006). How to increase and sustain positive emotion: The effects of expressing gratitude and visualizing best possible selves. Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 73–82. Research on positive activity interventions, closely related to the luck diary component of Wiseman's luck school. Useful for understanding the mechanism — attention training toward positive events — rather than the gratitude/luck content specifically.

For the Curious: Going Deeper

Busch, C. (2020). The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck. Riverhead Books. A contemporary extension of Wiseman's framework, with particular attention to organizational and social contexts for creating serendipity. Busch introduces the "serendipity hook" concept — saying or doing things that invite unexpected beneficial encounters. Directly previews Chapter 24.

Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House. Taleb's concept of antifragility — systems that benefit from volatility and randomness rather than merely surviving it — is the structural-level version of what Wiseman observed at the individual level. Lucky people are antifragile to randomness. This book provides the philosophical architecture.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. HarperCollins. Csikszentmihalyi's interview research with highly creative people reveals patterns that overlap substantially with lucky personality traits — broad curiosity, openness to experience, high tolerance for ambiguity. The creative personality and the lucky personality share significant DNA.