Do you know the magic formula to create luck?

An experimenter recruited four hundred people and divided them in two groups based on whether they considered themselves as lucky or unlucky. Each group was given a newspaper and asked to count the number of photographs inside.

The second page of the newspaper contained the message, “Stop counting – There are forty three photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was over two inches high. The experimenter even placed a second large message half way through the newspaper. This one announced, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win dollars two hundred and fifty.”

Should there be a performance difference between these two sets of people on this simple task of photograph counting?

Photo Adaptation/Flickr/silveraquarius/