x.com/aakashgupta/status/2041545816750567573
1 correction found
The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience.
This misstates Richard Wiseman’s findings. Published summaries of his luck research report significant differences on multiple traits—extroversion, neuroticism, and openness—not just openness, and they do not present education or family wealth as variables that were ruled out as the "single biggest differentiator."
Full reasoning
Wiseman's own summaries do not describe luck as being explained by a single personality trait.
On his official research page, he says the decade-long project identified four principles used by lucky people to create good fortune, including networking, adopting a relaxed attitude, and being open to new experiences. That page does not describe the result as a single-trait finding or as a comparison showing that education or family money were the main alternatives.
A Scientific American summary of Wiseman's work is even more specific: after giving subjects the Big Five personality scale, Wiseman found significant differences for extroversion, neuroticism, and openness. In other words, openness was not the only significant trait.
So the post compresses and changes the research in two ways:
- It turns a multi-trait / multi-principle result into a claim about one trait only.
- It says the study showed the key differentiator "wasn't IQ, education, or family money," but the published summaries cited here do not report any such head-to-head finding about education or family wealth.
That makes the quoted sentence an inaccurate description of Wiseman's research.
2 sources
- Luck - Richard Wiseman
"This research involves ... a decade-long project that identified the psychological principles used by lucky people to create their good fortune." It lists four principles, including "networking, adopting a relaxed attitude to life and being open to new experiences."
- As Luck Would Have It | Scientific American
"Although there were no differences between lucky and unlucky people on agreeableness and conscientiousness, Wiseman found significant differences for extroversion, neuroticism and openness."