Matthew Smith

Introduction

Matthew David Smith is a British psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Buckinghamshire New University (university staff record), where he is a founding member of the Centre for Positive Psychology. He is known for a body of work on luck: why some people describe themselves as persistently lucky or unlucky, what psychological mechanisms produce that sense, and whether anything beyond ordinary psychology is involved. He is also a co-author with Piers Worth on self-transcendence and on the case for a second wave of positive psychology.

His training places him in an unusual position. He took his PhD at the University of Hertfordshire under Richard Wiseman, in a research group that worked on both the psychology and the parapsychology of anomalous experience, and his early publications sit in parapsychology journals. His later work sits inside positive psychology. He thus belongs to a small group of researchers who carried the methods of a sceptical parapsychology into mainstream wellbeing research, and much of his published output is aimed at showing that experiences people describe as lucky have ordinary explanations.

Early Life and Education

Smith read applied psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, graduating in 1992, and then moved to the University of Hertfordshire, where he completed his doctorate in 1998. His thesis, Perceptions of One's Own Luck: The Formation, Maintenance, and Consequences of Perceived Luckiness, was the first systematic attempt in British psychology to treat the subjective sense of being a lucky person as a research object in its own right rather than as an item on a locus of control scale.

The thesis gives a good picture of his method. He assembled a database of 126 members of the public who identified themselves as especially lucky or especially unlucky, interviewed a subsample, and then compared the two groups on questionnaires and laboratory tasks. Self-described lucky participants scored higher on optimism and self-esteem; unlucky participants scored higher on depression, anxiety, anger and fatigue. Unlucky participants also performed significantly worse on a task requiring probability judgements. He found partial evidence of a memory bias favouring lucky over unlucky events among lucky participants, and, importantly, no evidence that subjective reinterpretation of the same event was doing the work. In a study of National Lottery play, perceived luckiness predicted expectations of success but neither how much people played nor how much they won.

Academic and Professional Career

Smith worked at the University of Hertfordshire through the mid-1990s, the period in which the luck research was done, and then at Liverpool Hope University from 1999 to 2009. He has also taught at Liverpool John Moores University and Oxford Brookes University.

He joined Buckinghamshire New University in 2011 as a lecturer in the School of Human and Social Sciences and is now Senior Lecturer there. He helped found the university's Centre for Positive Psychology and has been centrally involved in its MSc in Applied Positive Psychology since the programme was created in 2012, first as co-course leader and later as leader of the MSc in Mental Health and Wellbeing in Education. He supervises doctoral work and has published with colleagues on character strengths interventions in schools.

From roughly 2019 onward his writing has been increasingly collaborative with Piers Worth, and the pair have produced chapters and papers on happiness, narrative identity, self-transcendence and the post-pandemic state of positive psychology.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The psychology of perceived luckiness

Smith's central contribution is the argument that feeling lucky is a stable individual difference with measurable correlates and identifiable mechanisms, not merely a superstition. With Wiseman, Peter Harris and Richard Joiner he set out the candidate explanations in a 1996 paper in the European Journal of Parapsychology: selective recall of favourable events, differing interpretations of identical outcomes, unconscious detection and use of information, and, separately, psi. Subsequent empirical work narrowed the list. Motivational biases of the kind that make people will for high dice numbers, implicit learning of the statistical structure of a task, and cognitive biases such as the gambler's fallacy together account for a substantial part of the phenomenon, and they do so without any appeal to the paranormal.

Testing, and failing to find, the psi version

Because the parapsychological hypothesis was on the table, Smith tested it directly. In a 1997 study in the Journal of Parapsychology, participants classified as lucky, unlucky or uncertain predicted the output of a binary random number generator, in competitive and non-competitive conditions. Lucky participants did no better than unlucky ones, and the competitive manipulation made no difference. A later paper with Wiseman and Harris in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research examined the relationship between luck and psi and did not establish one. The honest summary of that strand of his work is negative: the sense of being lucky is real, and the paranormal account of it is unsupported by his own data.

Sceptical work inside parapsychology

The same pattern holds in his other parapsychological publications. With Wiseman and Diana Kornbrot he reconstructed the Princeton autoganzfeld laboratory and argued that sounds from the sender's room could have been detected subliminally by the experimenter involved in judging, a potential sensory leakage route that needed to be eliminated in a strict replication. With Wiseman and Julie Milton he tested Sheldrake's psychic pet claim and found no evidence that animals anticipate their owners' return. With Devin Terhune he ran a mirror-gazing study in which half the participants were given suggestions designed to encourage anomalous experiences; the suggested group reported more visual and auditory hallucinations, supporting the sceptical explanation of mirror-gazing phenomena. An attempted replication of Daryl Bem's implicit precognition procedure with spider-fearful participants was non-significant for the group as a whole.

Luck as a positive psychology target

The later phase of the work asks a different question: if luck is largely a matter of attention, expectation and readiness to act on chance opportunities, can it be trained? With Worth, Smith has argued that luck experiences sit naturally inside positive psychology, alongside gratitude, optimism and mindfulness, and he has extended Wiseman's Luck School into a programme built explicitly on positive psychology exercises. In a study reported in 2016 and written up with Worth, 66 participants completed six sessions over twelve weeks covering gratitude, optimism and awareness of opportunity, and reported more lucky experiences afterwards. He has since developed this as the Go Luck Yourself programme.

Self-transcendence and the second wave

With Worth he has also worked on self-transcendence, the construct at the centre of what the pair call second wave positive psychology, which holds that the field must engage with suffering, limitation and mortality rather than with positive states alone. Their joint writing argues that self-transcendence has been defined in ways that are obscure and imprecisely spiritual, and that the field needs a usable account of it before it can design interventions.

Major Publications

  • Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., Harris, P., & Joiner, R. (1996). On being lucky: The psychology and parapsychology of luck. European Journal of Parapsychology, 12, 35-43 — the programmatic paper, setting out normal and paranormal candidate explanations for perceived luckiness.
  • Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., Machin, D., Harris, P., & Joiner, R. (1997). Luckiness, competition, and performance on a psi task. Journal of Parapsychology, 61, 33-44 — the direct test; no advantage for self-described lucky participants.
  • Wiseman, R., Smith, M. D., & Kornbrot, D. (1996). Exploring possible sender-to-experimenter acoustic leakage in the PRL autoganzfeld experiments — a methodological critique of the autoganzfeld database.
  • Wiseman, R., Smith, M. D., & Milton, J. (1998). Can animals detect when their owners are returning home? — an experimental test of the psychic pet claim, with a null result.
  • Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., & Harris, P. (2000). The relationship between luck and psi. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 94, 25-36.
  • Smith, M. D. (1998). Perceptions of One's Own Luck: The Formation, Maintenance, and Consequences of Perceived Luckiness (doctoral thesis, University of Hertfordshire).
  • Smith, M. D., & Worth, P. (2019). Positive psychology and luck experiences — the chapter that moves his luck research into the positive psychology frame.
  • Holding, A., Proctor, C., Tweed, R., & Smith, M. D. (2023). Strengths Gym: The impact of a character strengths-based intervention on the self-esteem of children with special educational needs and disabilities.
  • Worth, P., & Smith, M. D. (2023). Happiness: Perspectives from Positive Psychology — a chapter tracing the concept from Aristotle to contemporary wellbeing research.

Impact and Legacy

Smith's influence is of two kinds. Within positive psychology he is one of the few researchers working on luck as a legitimate topic, and his partnership with Worth has helped make Buckinghamshire New University a centre for second wave positive psychology. Within parapsychology his early work is part of the sceptical, methodologically self-critical wing of the field, and the luck studies are among the better-known attempts to give the paranormal hypothesis a fair test and report a null result.

The criticisms are correspondingly twofold. The first concerns the evidential status of the psi strand. Every direct test Smith ran was null or marginal, and the one positive finding he reported, a relationship between predicted and actual performance on a random number generator at the borderline level, has never been built into a replicable effect. The precognition paradigm his group attempted to replicate has since failed in large multi-laboratory replications. A reasonable reading is that this work demonstrates the absence of the effect rather than its presence, and readers who encounter the titles without the results will draw the opposite conclusion.

The second concerns the intervention work. The Go Luck Yourself study, as reported, followed a single group of 66 participants through six sessions across twelve weeks. Without a comparison condition, expectation, demand characteristics and the ordinary drift of attention over three months cannot be separated from the effect of the exercises. This is a general weakness in the positive psychology intervention literature, where average effects are small and highly variable, and Smith's study sits within it rather than above it.

There is also a standing question about construct status. Luck is not a trait with a consensual definition or a well-validated measure; his own Perceived Luckiness Questionnaire was built for the thesis and has not become a standard instrument. Critics would add that a Centre for Positive Psychology which also houses parapsychology risks reinforcing the complaint that the field's evidential standards are soft, even when, as in Smith's case, the parapsychological work consists largely of failing to find paranormal effects.

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References

  • Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., Harris, P., & Joiner, R. (1996). On being lucky: The psychology and parapsychology of luck. European Journal of Parapsychology, 12, 35-43.
  • Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., Machin, D., Harris, P., & Joiner, R. (1997). Luckiness, competition, and performance on a psi task. Journal of Parapsychology, 61, 33-44.
  • Wiseman, R., Smith, M. D., & Kornbrot, D. (1996). Exploring possible sender-to-experimenter acoustic leakage in the PRL autoganzfeld experiments. Journal of Parapsychology, 60(2), 97-128.
  • Smith, M. D. (1998). Perceptions of one’s own luck: The formation, maintenance, and consequences of perceived luckiness (Doctoral thesis, University of Hertfordshire).
  • Wiseman, R., Smith, M. D., & Milton, J. (1998). Can animals detect when their owners are returning home? British Journal of Psychology, 89(3), 453-461.
  • Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., & Harris, P. (2000). The relationship between luck and psi. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 94, 25-36.
  • Smith, M. D., & Worth, P. (2019). Positive psychology and luck experiences. In I. M. Church & R. J. Hartman (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of the philosophy and psychology of luck. Routledge.
  • Holding, A., Proctor, C., Tweed, R., & Smith, M. D. (2023). Strengths Gym: The impact of a character strengths-based intervention on the self-esteem of children with special educational needs and disabilities. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 7, Article 10.
  • Worth, P., & Smith, M. D. (2023). Happiness: Perspectives from positive psychology. In S. Chetri, T. Dutta, & M. K. Mandal (Eds.), Understanding happiness: An explorative view. Springer.

Last updated: 2026-10-27

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