| Abstract |
| It is frequently found in daily life that people who experience good luck as lottery winners try to improve their background (e.g., home, car) but it has not been empirically validated why they do that. Present research attempts to explore the prediction that people who experience good luck expand the scope of attention to background and those who undergo bad luck shrink the scope of attention to adjacent objects. Findings from Experiment 1a indicate that participants who experienced good luck (won the rock-paper-scissors game) paid more attention to background and performed worse in the “find the hidden picture” (below FHP) task while those who underwent bad luck (lost the rock-paper-scissors game) paid more attention to objects, leading to better performance in the FHP task. It is also found in Experiment 1a that, if people washed their hands after experiencing good or bad luck, the opposite result occurred. Experiment 1b confirmed that the rock-paper-scissor game manipulated good and bad luck successfully and did not influence self-control. Experiment 2 shows that people who strongly believe in good luck performed poorly in FHP task while those who do not believe in good luck performed well in FHP task. Overall, three experiments support the proposed research hypotheses. Implications of the study findings for cognitive psychology and related fields including consumer and sports psychology are discussed. |
|
|
| Key Words |
| 행운, 불운, 주의, 배경, 대상, good luck, bad luck, attention, background, object |
|
|
 |
|
