Why good luck charms perk up performance?

LONDON - Don’t scoff at those lucky stones. New research shows that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve your performance - by increasing your self-confidence.

“I watch a lot of sports and I noticed that very often athletes - also famous athletes - hold superstitions,” says Lysann Damisch of University of Cologne, Germany, who led the study.

“Michael Jordan used to wear his college team shorts underneath his basketball uniform for good luck; Tiger Woods wears a red shirt in tournaments on Sundays, usually the last and most important day of a tournament. And I was wondering, why are they doing so?” she added.

Damisch thought that a belief in superstition might help people do better by improving their confidence, reports journal Psychological Science.

Damisch and her colleagues Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler designed a set of experiments to see if activating people’s superstitious beliefs would improve their performance.

In one of the experiments, volunteers were told to bring a lucky charm with them. People brought all kinds of items, from old stuffed animals to wedding rings to lucky stones. The researchers took it away on the pretext to take a picture.

Half the volunteers were given their lucky charm back before the test; the other half were told there was a problem with the camera equipment and they would get it back later, says a university statement.

Volunteers who had their lucky charm did better at a memory game on computer and set higher goals for themselves. Tests showed that this difference was because they felt more confident.

Moreover, just wishing good luck, improved volunteers’ success at a task that required manual dexterity.

“Of course, it doesn’t mean you win. Even Michael Jordan lost basketball games sometimes,” Damisch says.