Derren Brown: The Experiments S01E04 - The Secret of Luck

********** PROPER **********

Repack of the torrent uploaded earlier with a 9 minute frameskip anomaly at pixelated and out of sync from 9m02s with a frozen video. This is the repack.

****************************

Derren convinces an entire town that they're blessed with extraordinary good fortune - but is there any such thing as luck? Does it make any difference?

Title..............: Derren Brown: The Experiments
Aired On Channel...: Channel 4
Airing Date........: 11/11/2011
Source.............: PDTV
Resolution.........: 624 x 352
Aspect Ratio.......: WS 1.773
Framerate..........: 25 FPS
Video Codec........: XviD
Audio..............: MP3 @ 128kbps VBR 48KHz
Size...............: 550 MB
Link...............: http://www.tvrage.com/shows/id-29800

WHAT IS LUCK?

Luck is generally considered either good or bad and generated by chance events out of our control. Those of a supernatural disposition might choose to use charms to ward off bad luck or bring on the good. Those of a more scientific frame of mind might remember a quote by Chip Denman of the Statistics Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He said, 'Luck is probability taken personally.'

Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire is an expert on luck. Following many surveys and experiments he concludes, in his book The Luck Factor, that luck is a state of mind. People who believe themselves lucky or unlucky have assigned themselves a label that genuinely impacts on their life. The lucky people are good at creating and finding opportunities. Wiseman believes that you can do much to improve your luck by having a positive attitude and improving the way you deal with opportunity.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

Why do some people think of themselves as unlucky? One reason can be found in a 2003 experiment conducted by Richard Wiseman. Wiseman was replicating Stanley Milgram's Small World experiment from the 1960s.

One hundred people were asked to get a package to a stranger by first sending it to someone they knew and asking them to send it to someone they knew and so on. The eventual target was an events organiser in Cheltenham. Subjects were only allowed to send the package to a person they knew on first name terms. The aim was to find out how many people it takes to connect any two strangers. It is an experiment that has become associated with the phrase 'six degrees of separation.'

Wiseman discovered that around twenty of the subjects didnt even send off the package. This was strange because they had gone to some trouble in applying to be part of the experiment. Subsequent analysis showed that these were people who had labelled themselves as unlucky. And the reason they did not send off the packages was that they didn't know many people to send it to. Luck depends on exploiting opportunities but opportunities increase the greater the network of friends and associations we have. Those who have fewer friends or networking abilities have fewer opportunities and therefore appear to be blessed with less luck.

LUCKY CHARMS

Experiments conducted to determine the efficacy of lucky charms generally find that they do not work. However, in 2010 researchers at the University of Cologne released a report concluding that charms and other good luck behaviours, such as crossed-fingers, can work (Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler). Subjects who used a lucky charm while taking part in memory and other skill tasks beat the scores of those who did not use a lucky charm.

The researchers say this is because over 80% of the subjects believed in the concept of luck. 'Activating a superstition improves subsequent performance,' says the report. Many famous sportspersons and athletes are superstitious and sports coaches and psychologists are aware that taking away their good luck charms and lucky shirts might do more harm than good.

Barack Obama is reported to have carried a selection of trinkets with him during his election campaign, notably a lucky poker chip. He also told journalist Steve Kroft on the US show 60 Minutes, 'We realized that we had played basketball before Iowa and before South Carolina. We didn't play basketball before New Hampshire and Nevada. And so now we've made a clear rule that on Election Day I have to play basketball.' Not to be left out John McCain carried a feather, a compass and a flattened penny for luck.

THE GAMBLER'S FALLACY

Casinos depend on the mathematics of probability to make their profits but gamblers like to believe they can exert control over random events. They believe in lucky streaks and hot tables. This is due to a misunderstanding of the laws of probability that is frequently misinterpreted to mean 'law of averages.' If a coin is tossed ten times and comes up heads eight times and tails two, it is tempting to think that the next toss of the coin is more likely to produce a tail. But that is wrong. The coin has no memory. If all is fair, the chance of tossing heads or tails is always 50/50. In a similar fashion, other so-called streaks of good or bad luck might be equally unrelated. Your car breaking down last week has no relation to it raining on your holiday the month before. But some people accumulate these unfortunate events to build their unlucky profile and, in the case of gamblers, blame the cards, the dealer or even the number of the door on their hotel room for their losses.

Further Reading:

The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman
Wiseman reveals how luck or the lack of it is a personality trait and an attitude that can be changed using a few simple strategies as used in his Luck School project.
Arrow (2004)

What's Luck Got to Do with It? by Joseph Mazur
Contains a detailed history of gambling and the psychology of play including an analysis of the television game show Deal or No Deal?
Princeton University Press (2010)

Quirkology by Richard Wiseman
An insight into the stranger aspects of human behaviour including luck, astrology, superstition and the sometimes irrational and counterintuitive way we make decisions.
Macmillan (2007)

SuperSense: Why We Believe the Unbelievable by Bruce Hood
An entertaining and informative book that asks why we demolish the homes of murderers and why Tony Blair always wore the same shoes at Prime Minister's Question Time? Belief in luck perhaps?
Constable & Robinson (2009)

Source:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-the-experiments/articles...
http://derrenbrown.co.uk/blog/tag/the-experiments/