Does Chuck-ALuck improve performance? A Meta-analysis


Chuck-A-Luck is a popular theme for birthday parties. Children and adults play the game using standard playing cards. They then place their cards into a Chuck A Lucky machine. The machine will randomly roll a set of dice and spit out the numbers one through nine. The game's winner is the player who has the most luck cards at the end.

When a single piece of cardboard or a small piece of scrap paper is rolled around one of the numbered dice. This is known as the "cable tube" and acts as the center point from where the dice are rolled. It may seem like a simple concept but the level of skill needed to master Chuck-A Luck is impressive. Two factors are essential when dealing in Chuck-A Luck. One is the luck and skill of the players. Both of these aspects are dependent on the outcome of previous rolls.

Researchers conducted a joint task context in which one group participated and the other did not. This was to determine the luck factor. Each participant was asked to imagine they were in a romantic relationship with their partner and was given a questionnaire. The questions included "do you feel like you and your partner share the same luck?" and "how would you identify if there are any significant sex differences in outcome evaluation when you and your partner did a Chuck-A-Luck game?" Each participant was then asked to answer a series of questions about their perceptions of luck, how they felt the relationship developed, and how it helped or encouraged them to grow.

In this context of joint task, there were significant sex variations in the responses to the questionnaires on luck and intimacy. Chuck-A-Lucky made it easier for men to win. The association between winning and intimacy was enhanced by a previous conditioning procedure. There was no significant association between winning and intimacy in women. Women also showed an increase in their chances of being the loser after the Chuck-A Luck element was introduced into the social environment.

Both sexes found a positive association between the Chuck -A-Lucky task context, the magnitude of winning and the extent of the winning. There was an increase in participants who described themselves to be very lucky, but not necessarily with a high chance of winning the game. Participants did not report any significant changes in their frequency of being very unlucky. This does not support the idea that Chuck-A-Lucky task context makes them more lucky. The correlation between the Chuck-A-Lucky task level and winning percentage is therefore generally weak. It is therefore not possible to show that people are luckier when they are given a task context.

Finally, we ran a main affect to determine if the slopes between wealth distributions and health changed in the Chuck-A-Lucky versus the placebo conditions. We used the original set to collect the questionnaire items, one for each condition. Again, there were significant differences in the slopes of the wealth-health relationships for men and women. But, there were significant interactions between the two variables for both men and women, with the wealth effect being more pronounced for women (d = -.12, p =.01). Although there is no strong evidence that Chuck-A-Luck results in greater good fortune, it does indicate a possible association between the task context, and increased likelihood for positive outcomes.

A chi-square distribution can also be used to examine the association between Chuck-A Luck and health and wealth. Here, we compared each participant's mean log-transformed intercepts. We then used the chi square distribution to analyze each participant. A contingency variable indicated if the participant was in the extreme right quarter of the distribution. This is the ideal value at that moment in time. For this analysis, we used the same number of pairs for intercepts, but the chi-squared degrees before comparison were varied across the eleven questionnaires.

The results showed that Chuck-A-Lucky had significant effects on the slopes of the logistic regression slopes for the logistic outcome. The probability that a participant would be in the extreme right quarter of the distribution increases significantly (p=.01), indicating the effectiveness of Chuck-A-Lucky on the slope of logistic regression slope for the logistic outcome. The same analysis could also be conducted using a graphical expectancy model to test whether the probability that participants would fall into the extreme right quadrant depends on the task condition. Again, using logistic regression, there was a significant main effect of Chuck-A-Lucky on the probability that a participant would fall into the extreme left quadrant of the distribution (a quadratic function with a negative slope), again indicating that Chuck-A Luck improves task performance. Further analysis showed that there was a significant effect of task condition on the slope of the distribution for the mean value of the chi square intercept, indicating that Chuck-A-Lucky improves task performance when the task is challenging, while luck improves only when the task is easy.