Why Lucky Charms Sometimes Work: The Powerful Positive Performance Psychology Of Superstition
Can luck really influence the outcome of events? That question has captivated otherwise rational people for centuries—and challenged scientists to somehow prove whether lucky charms, special shirts or ritualistic behaviors hold special powers.
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They do. (Sometimes.) New research coming out in June suggests that a belief in good luck can affect performance.
In a test conducted by researchers from the University of Cologne, participants on a putting green who were told they were playing with a “lucky ball” sank 6.4 putts out of 10, nearly two more putts, on average, than those who weren’t told the ball was lucky. That is a 35% improvement. The results suggest new thinking in how to view luck and are intriguing to behavorial psychologists.
“Our results suggest that the activation of a superstition can indeed yield performance-improving effects,” says Lysann Damisch, co-author of the Cologne study, set to be published in the journal Psychological Science. The sample size, just 28 university students, was small, but the effect was big enough to be statistically significant.
Believing in their own good fortune can help people only in situations where they can affect the outcome. It can’t, say, help people watching a horse race they have bet on.
While the findings have not been published, this study could prompt psychologists to explore ways to tap into people’s belief in good luck. “Simply being told this is a lucky ball is sufficient to affect performance,” Stuart Vyse, professor of psychology at Connecticut College and author of “Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition,” says of the new study.
More Accuracy: Participants who were handed a golf ball and told, ‘Here is your ball. So far it has turned out to be a lucky ball,’ were 35% more likely to make a golf putt than participants who were told, ‘This is the ball everyone has used so far.’.
When Anthony Overfield rides his motorcycle, he carries two passengers on board: so-called gremlin bells. The 46-year-old runs a Web site, New York Biker, and sells merchandise at bike shows statewide. Gremlin bells are his best sellers. Many bikers believe these small brass bells, mounted near the back of his bike, help ward off accidents. “My bike’s in good shape,” he says. “I’m healthy. I haven’t been involved with any altercations with vehicles.” In short, his good-luck charms seem to be working.
Still, people often overestimate how much control they have over a situation. For a 2003 paper, researchers in the U.K. enlisted 107 traders at London investment banks to play a computer game simulating a live stock index. They were told that pressing the letters Z, X and C on the keyboard “may have some effect on the index,” when in fact it didn’t.
Nonetheless, many traders had an illusion of control. This characteristic could have detracted from their job performance. Traders in the study who held the strongest false belief in control had lower salaries in real life, suggesting that excessive belief in their own control of “luck” may have hurt their trading decisions.
“The idea that wearing a red shirt, saying some sort of incantation or prayer or carrying a lucky charm will bring good luck is very appealing because it gives people the illusion that they have some degree of control over future events in their lives,” says Peter Thall, a biostatistician at the University of Texas. “The painful truth is that we have little or no control over the most important events in our lives.”
Better Memory: with their ‘lucky charms’ on hand performed significantly better than those separated from their charms. Moreover, participants with their lucky charms reported that they felt 30% more capable than participants without the charms.
Mathematicians have demonstrated the role that randomness plays in life—”there are no long-term successful craps players,” says Harvey Mudd College mathematician Arthur Benjamin.
But don’t tell that to the people who believe they can shape their own luck. They’re well represented in games of chance, such as lotteries and casinos, and will be out in force at Saturday’s Kentucky Derby, in which a favorite is named, what else, Lookin At Lucky.
On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon at Aqueduct Race Track in Queens, N.Y., Dennis Canetty was wearing a brown suit. Not an everyday, run-of-the-mill, ordinary brown suit. The retired Wall Street trader, age 61, was sporting his lucky brown suit to help the horse he co-owns, Always a Party, win the second race. The power of the suit is real and proven: Mr. Canetty was wearing it at the Preakness Stakes two years ago when Macho Again, another horse he co-owns, finished second as a 40-to-1 long shot.
“It’s silly,” he said a few minutes before race time. “My wife thinks I’m nuts.”
Even some otherwise calculating mathematicians hold irrational beliefs about luck. “I tell my class, ‘Don’t bother entering sweepstakes; it’s so unlikely you’re going to win,” says Joseph Mazur, a mathematician at Marlboro College and author of the book “What’s Luck Got to Do with It?” coming out in July. But then his wife entered him in a sweepstakes and he won $20,000.
More Persistence: In an anagram game, in which participants had to make as many words as possible from a string of eight letters, participants with their lucky charms set higher goals (16 more words) and persisted longer (nearly 5½-minutes longer) than participants whose lucky charms had been removed.
“There I was for months afterwards, entering every sweepstakes contest I could find,” he says. It was futile—he never repeated.
Investors also are prone to superstitions. For example, during an eclipse, which many cultures view as a bad omen, major U.S. stock-market indexes typically fall, according to research conducted by Gabriele Lepori, assistant professor of finance at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. This effect persists even after controlling for economic news and long-term trends. And the indexes usually bounce back soon afterward.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, known for basing personnel decisions on statistics, notes with bemusement the superstition of some of his highest-paid employees. “Every locker room has a comical procession of superstitions,” he said in an email. “We have things based on time, on speech intonations and on specific conversation exchanges. If you look at the introductions of any NBA team and what the players do, you have an anthropologist’s dream.”
But at Times False Confidence: In a stock-market simulation, 107 traders were told that pressing the letters Z, X and C on a keyboard ‘may have some effect on the index,’ when in fact it didn’t. Traders in the study who held the strongest belief that the keys made a difference had lower salaries in real life, suggesting that ‘luck’ may hurt their trading decisions.
But Mr. Cuban is sticking with his stats. “When it’s all said and done, it’s about performance and data,” he said. “Guys will change their superstitions, but the numbers don’t lie.”
Still, he says he has some superstitions of his own to give his Mavs a boost, “but there is no chance I tell you; that kills them.” These may not have helped his team in the playoffs: Dallas trails San Antonio, three games to two.
And did Mr. Canetty’s lucky brown suit prove to be lucky? His horse, Always a Party, was bumped early in the race and jockey Channing Hill went flying. “I threw the suit away,” Mr. Canetty said on Tuesday. “I’m not wearing that suit anymore.” For the next race, “I’ll try out a new suit, and see if it brings better luck.”
Read The Original Research Dissertation
Credit: CARL BIALIK : The Wall Street Journal
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Winners Are Grinners: Even If There’s Nothing to Win!
Whether it’s for money, marbles or chalk, the brains of reward-driven people keep their game faces on, helping them win at every step of the way. Surprisingly, they win most often when there is no reward.
That’s the finding of neuroscientists at Washington University in St. Louis, who tested 31 randomly selected subjects with word games, some of which had monetary rewards of either 25 or 75 cents per correct answer, others of which had no money attached.
Subjects were given a short list of five words to memorize in a matter of seconds, then a 3.5-second interval or pause, then a few seconds to respond to a solitary word that either had been on the list or had not. Test performance had no consequence in some trials, but in others, a computer graded the responses, providing an opportunity to win either 25 cent or 75 cents for quick and accurate answers. Even during these periods, subjects were sometimes alerted that their performance would not be rewarded on that trial.
Prior to testing, subjects were submitted to a battery of personality tests that rated their degree of competitiveness and their sensitivity to monetary rewards.
Designed to test the hypothesis that excitement in the brains of the most monetary-reward-sensitive subjects would slacken during trials that did not pay, the study is co-authored by Koji Jimura, PhD, a post-doctoral researcher, and Todd Braver, PhD, a professor, both based in psychology in Arts & Sciences. Braver is also a member of the neuroscience program and radiology department in the university’s School of Medicine.
But the researchers found a paradoxical result: the performance of the most reward-driven individuals was actually most improved – relative to the less reward-driven – in the trials that paid nothing, not the ones in which there was money at stake.
Even more striking was that the brain scans taken using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) showed a change in the pattern of activity during the non-rewarded trials within the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), located right behind the outer corner of the eyebrow, an area that is strongly linked to intelligence, goal-driven behavior and cognitive strategies. The change in lateral PFC activity was statistically linked to the extra behavioral benefits observed in the reward-driven individuals.
The researchers suggest that this change in lateral PFC activity patterns represents a flexible shift in response to the motivational importance of the task, translating this into a superior task strategy that the researchers term “proactive cognitive control.” In other words, once the rewarding motivational context is established in the brain indicating there is a goal-driven contest at hand, the brain actually rallies its neuronal troops and readies itself for the next trial, whether it’s for money or not.
“It sounds reasonable now, but when I happened upon this result, I couldn’t believe it because we expected the opposite results,” says Jimura, first author of the paper. “I had to analyze the data thoroughly to persuade myself. The important finding of our study is that the brains of these reward- sensitive individuals do not respond to the reward information on individual trials. Instead, it shows that they have persistent motivation, even in the absence of a reward. You’d think you’d have to reward them on every trial to do well. But it seems that their brains recognized the rewarding motivational context that carried over across all the trials.”
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The finding sheds more light on the workings of the lateral PFC and provides potential behavioral clues about personality, motivation, goals and cognitive strategies. The research has important implications for understanding the nature of persistent motivation, how the brain creates such states, and why some people seem to be able to use motivation more effectively than others. By understanding the brain circuitry involved, it might be possible to create motivational situations that are more effective for all individuals, not just the most reward-driven ones, or to develop drug therapies for individuals that suffer from chronic motivational problems.Their results are published April 26 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Everyone knows of competitive people who have to win, whether in a game of HORSE, golf or the office NCAA basketball tournament pool. The findings might tell researchers something about the competitive drive.
The researchers are interested in the signaling chain that ignites the prefrontal cortex when it acts on reward-driven impulses, and they speculate that the brain chemical dopamine could be involved. That could be a potential direction of future studies. Dopamine neurons, once thought to be involved in a host of pleasurable situations, but now considered more of learning or predictive signal, might respond to cues that let the lateral PFC know that it’s in for something good. This signal might help to keep information about the goals, rules or best strategies for the task active in mind to increase the chances of obtaining the desired outcome.
In the context of this study, when a 75-cent reward is available for a trial, the dopamine-releasing neurons could be sending signals to the lateral PFC that “jump start” it to do the right procedures to get a reward.
“It would be like the dopamine neurons recognize a cup of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and tell the lateral PFC the right action strategy to get the reward – to grab a spoon and bring the ice cream to your mouth,” says Braver. “We think that the dopamine neurons fires to the cue rather than the reward itself, especially after the brain learns the relationship between the two. We’d like to explore that some more.”
They also are interested in the “reward carryover state,” or the proactive cognitive strategy that keeps the brain excited even in gaps, such as pauses between trials or trials without rewards. They might consider a study in which rewards are far fewer.
“It’s possible we’d see more slackers with less rewards,” Braver says. “That might have an effect on the reward carryover state. There are a host of interesting further questions that this work brings up which we plan to pursue.”
Source: Washington University in St. Louis,
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About Peter
Peter Brown BHMS (Hons) MPsychClin MAPS
I’m a Clinical Psychologist and have a private practice and consultancy in Brisbane Australia. I have 24 years experience in child, adult and family clinical psychology. I have a wonderful wife and three kids.
I am co-founder of Christian Wholeness Counselling Services.
I like researching issues of the brain & mind, reading and seeking out new books and resources for myself and my clients. I thought that others might be interested in some of what I have found also, hence this blog…
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