LUCKINESS, COMPETITION, AND PERFORMANCE ON A PSI TASK

This paper briefly reviews previous research on luck and psi, and pres ents a study on luckiness, competition, and performance on a psi task from an ongoing research project into the psychology and parapsycholog y of luck and luckiness. Participants were classified as either lucky, unlucky, or uncertain, according to their responses on a Luckiness Qu estionnaire. Participants were then asked to guess the outcomes of a s eries of pseudo-RNG based coin-flips in either a competitive or non-co mpetitive situation. Prior to completing this task, each subject was a sked to rate how well they thought they would do at the task. It was f ound that lucky participants performed no better than unlucky particip ants on the psi task and gave nonsignificantly higher ratings of predi cted psi performance. Participants in the competitive condition did no t perform significantly better on the psi task than participants in th e non-competitive condition. Most notably, however, a significant posi tive correlation was found between predicted psi performance and actua l psi performance. The implications of these findings are discussed, a s are suggested directions for future research.