Friday The 13th: Are You Feeling Unlucky?

Photo Credit: Andrew Mager via Flickr

Is Friday the 13th unluckier than any other day? You may be surprised to hear it, but this question has actually been extensively studied.

Scientists like to have some fun too, and their seemingly supernatural findings sometimes even end up in respected journals.

British researchers have found, for instance, that car accidents are more likely to occur on Friday the 13th compared to Fridays that fall on other days of the month.

A subsequent study found that it was actually only women who experienced a spike in traffic accidents on Friday the 13th, and men saw no change.

Other research has found evidence of a bad luck streak in the form of lower returns from trading financial securities on Friday the 13th, even while Fridays generally see higher returns. (If you’re Bernie Sanders, though, you may see bankers losing money as a sign of good luck.)

Of course, for each of these studies, follow-up research has found that Friday the 13th is just as "lucky" as any other day.

A short history of luck and unluck

While fear of Friday the 13th as particularly unlucky only appears to have emerged since the 19th Century, the nature of luck has fascinated thinkers for millennia.

Ancient people believed that luck was controlled by the gods, and they engaged in various rituals to gain divine favor. Stoic philosophers, on the other hand, recognized luck as entirely out of human hands, and encouraged their followers to embrace the whims of circumstance.

Determinists, like the Protestant theologian John Calvin, believed there was no such thing as luck, because all of human life were already predetermined by God. It's believed he wrote in his book "Institutes" the following:

God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.

But, as Steven Hales, professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University, pointed out, "Even though there's an official denial of luck [by Calvin], what you really get is a reliance on luck."

The Calvinist view, he argued, brings luck full circle. Hales said, "If you think that you are fated from the beginning of the world to enter heaven or be damned to hell, well, if that's the case, then there's nothing you can do to alter your destiny.

"And if that's true, then if I get into heaven, that's just luck again," Hales continued. "Instead of a fatalist view of luck, it reconstitutes it in a new form."

Modern day arguments about the meaning of luck often have moral implications. One major question surrounds a notion called "moral luck," which refers to the habit of blaming people not just for the choices they make but for the consequences of their choices that were beyond their control.

Thomas Nagel, the late philosopher, once gave an example of moral luck in the case of two drunk drivers: Both are impaired to the same degree, and both make the morally bad choice to drive while intoxicated. But one of them happens to hit and kill a pedestrian, while the other drives home recklessly but doesn't injure anyone.

While we may criticize both people for driving while drunk, the law and our moral intuitions react more strongly to the driver who killed the pedestrian. This person may be guilty of homicide and to blame for the death, while the other person is just regarded as reckless.

But when pushed to think about this problem more, many people worry that we really should treat the two drunk drivers differently. They both made the same morally bad choices; one just happened to have those bad choices, unluckily and unfortunately, result in someone's death. Can we really judge someone as morally worse than another, when the only difference between the two is that one person was luckier?

On the other side, there are important questions to ask about how much people should be praised or rewarded for skills or achievements, given how subject to luck any given accomplishment may be.

Nagel worried that these kinds of problems might undermine the very notion of human responsibility, writing in his 1979 book "Mortal Questions," "Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised."

Philosophers and legal scholars continue to debate whether judgments on these topics are correct and the effect of luck on responsibility.

The meaning of luck

Hales also suggests that our concepts of good and bad luck are far less clear than they may seem. To make the point, Hales noted that many people would agree that if you buy a lottery ticket, and miss the winning numbers by a single digit, you were very unlucky. After all, if you had just one more correct number, you'd have been a winner.

But consider an alternate description of the scenario: You buy a lottery ticket, and five out of six numbers are correct. When the event is described in this way, people describe it as lucky. After all, you were so close to winning the lottery.

Hales also mentioned anecdotal evidence that we might deploy the concept of luck in our own favor. "We're much more prone to attribute our own success to our skill, and our failures to bad luck, and the reverse is true for others," he said.

"So the people who competed with me and got the job that I didn't? They were lucky. It wasn't that they were better," Hales continued.

For some of these reasons, Hales is skeptical that the idea of "luck" is actually meaningful at all. Other ideas, like chance and fortune, certainly make sense, but the notion of luck may have no coherent single definition. (Hales wrote a paper memorably titled "Why Every Theory of Luck Is Wrong.")

While this may seem like an esoteric debate, the notion of luck is intrinsic to many other important debates concerning criminal justice, as discussed, and also political philosophy.

For example, "luck egalitarians" believe that any gains or losses people face that result from luck should be redistributed. Ronald Dworkin, the imminent legal scholar, summarized the view this way: "Market allocations must be corrected in order to bring some people closer to the share of resources they would have had but for these various differences of advantages, luck, and inherent capacity."

Understanding our notions of "luck" better could help us make sense of that idea. But since Hales' study of luck leads him to believe that the concept may not have a coherent meaning, he thinks the "luck egalitarian" approach may be unhelpful.

"However we understand these issues about the just society, investigating luck and talking about luck egalitarianism isn't going to help us," he said.

With so much disagreement about our control over our lives and our ultimate fate, it's no surprise that superstitions have arisen to help explain the role luck plays in the world.

By blaming bad circumstances on a black cat's stroll or the time of week when the 13th of the month rolls around, we at least may feel that we've explained the vicissitudes of life. But if Hales is right, maybe all our talk of luck is just a big conceptual confusion; maybe it should be forgotten like an archaic myth.

Perhaps this idea should give some comfort to people fearful of Friday the 13th: Luck does not exist. It is all in your head.