Examining Luck and Optimism

The Daruma doll is a Zen symbol of perseverance and luck

Source: Photo by Ryutaro Tsukata from Pexels

This year, 2021, has been a tough year for many of us. We’ve dealt with a dangerous riot in Washington DC, social distancing, restrictions on how we interact with friends and family, virus variants, vaccines and boosters, and a great deal of trepidation about what might be coming at us in the new year.

Many of us are looking for an agent for the events that we see around us. We attribute cause to these agents, which can make us feel as though we’ve regained control, which in turn makes us feel less anxious and happier. Luck is one of the attributions we make about what caused a particular event to happen. We tend to use luck to explain situations where something random (or seemingly random) happens that we can’t otherwise explain.

Attribution styles

All of us tend to make attributions of luck in hindsight—after the event is over when we’ve experienced the consequence and we’re trying to figure out what it all means. There are patterns to the way we each make attributions that are part of our individual personality profiles. Social psychologists often refer to a person’s attributional style (or explanatory style).

Your attribution style is a pattern in the way you attribute or explain the cause of events in the world. Some of us have an optimistic attributional style—we tend to explain positive events as the result of some internal characteristic of ourselves (an internal attribution), but negative events as not our fault (an external attribution). Optimists also tend to see positive events as likely to happen again (stable and global) and negative events as unstable accidents—events that will likely not be repeated (unstable and local rather than global).

Pessimists, on the other hand, tend to see positive events as external to themselves but blame themselves for negative events. Pessimists also tend to see negative events as both stable and global—they’re going to last forever and happen over and over again in all areas of their lives, while positive events are seen as temporary and accidental—the reverse of the optimist.

Interestingly, optimists and pessimists use luck as an explanation for events in different ways, and research suggests their brains process information in different ways as well. Beliefs in good luck and optimism are positively related to one another—that means that the stronger your belief in good luck, the more optimistic you tend to be. Day and Maltby (2005) found that people who believe in good luck also tend to be hopeful about their lives, and this might account for their general happiness.

Pessimists and depression

People who are at the extreme end of the pessimist scale are more vulnerable to becoming depressed, says researcher Lyn Abramson. Depression is probably more accurately described as a set of disorders than as a single psychological illness, and Professor Abramson describes a type of depression she calls “hopelessness depression.” Depression of this sort is characterized by feelings of deep sadness, a decreased willingness to start new projects or to engage in social interactions, low energy levels, apathy, and decreased movement in general.

People suffering from hopelessness depression do not, as a general rule, believe in good luck. They tend to be serious pessimists—they anticipate bad things happening to them and negative consequences coming from those bad events, and their internal self-attributions are also negative. And, they may be using their executive attention systems differently than do the non-depressed optimists among us (Abramson, Metalsky and Alloy, 1989).

Research has shown that the activity in the left and right frontal lobes is asymmetrically active in people suffering from hopelessness depression, and more symmetrically active in the non-depressed. At the University of Wisconsin, researchers looked at EEGs recorded from a large sample of college students, none of whom had yet experienced even a minor episode of depression (Nusslock, Shackman, Harmon-Jones, Alloy, Coan, and Abramson, 2011). They found that the more pessimistic the student was, the lower the activity in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere was, relative to the activity in the right hemisphere. They also found that they could predict which student was going to be depressed three years down the road by looking at the balance of activity in the left vs. the right hemispheres. Both a seriously pessimistic outlook on life and asymmetrical activity in the frontal lobe predicted future episodes of hopelessness depression.

Optimism Essential Reads

Wired for Positivity: How Optimism Shapes Our Well-Being

Practicing Learned Optimism

So take heart, folks. With any luck, things might be looking up in 2022.