We all strive to be right. But what if people who are wrong have better lives? This week, a German study in Psychological Science appears to show that being superstitious improves performance, on a whole string of different tasks.
To be clear, I’m always conflicted over this kind of psychology research. On my left shoulder there is an angel. She says it’s risky to extrapolate from rarefied laboratory conditions to the real world. She says that publication bias in this field is extensive, so whenever researchers get negative findings, they’re probably left unpublished in a desk drawer. And she says it’s uncommon to see a genuinely systematic review of the literature on these topics, so you rarely get to see all the conflicting research in one place. My angel has read the books of Malcolm Gladwell, and she finds them to be silly and overstated.
On my right shoulder, there is a devil: she thinks this stuff is cool and fun. She is typing right now.
The researchers did four miniature experiments. In the first, they took twenty-eight students, over 80 per cent of whom said they believed in good luck, and randomly assigned them to either a superstition activator or a control condition. Then they put them on a putting green. To activate a superstition, for half of them, when handing over the ball the experimenter said: ‘Here is your ball. So far it has turned out to be a lucky ball.’ For the other half, the experimenter just said, ‘This is the ball everyone has used so far.’ Each participant then had ten goes at trying to get the ball into the hole from a distance of 100 cm: and lo, the students playing with a ‘lucky ball’ did significantly better than the others, with a mean score of 6.42, against 4.75 for the others.
Then they moved on to a second experiment. Fifty-one students were asked to perform a motor-dexterity task: an irritating, fiddly game where they had to get thirty-six little balls into thirty-six little holes by tilting a Perspex box. Beforehand, they were randomly assigned to one of three groups, each of which heard a different phrase just before starting. The superstition activator was ‘I press the thumbs for you,’ a German equivalent of the English expression ‘I’ve got my fingers crossed.’ The two ‘control’ or comparison groups were interesting. One group were told ‘I press the watch for you,’ with the idea that this implied a similar level of encouragement (I’m not so sure about that), and the other were told, ‘On “go”, you go.’ As predicted, the participants who were told someone was keeping their fingers crossed for them finished the task significantly faster.
Then things got more interesting, as the researchers tried to unpick why this was happening. They took forty-one students who had a lucky charm, and asked them to bring it to the session. It was either kept in the room, or taken out to be ‘photographed’. Then they were told about the memory task they were due to perform, and asked a whole bunch of questions about how confident they felt. The ones with their lucky charm in the room performed better on the memory game than those without; but more than that, they reported higher levels of ‘self-efficacy’, which was correlated with performance.
Finally, they probed these mechanisms even further. Thirty-one students were asked to bring their lucky charm. It was either taken away or not, and they were given an anagram task. Before starting, they were asked to set a goal: what percentage of all the hidden words did they think they could find? Then they began. As expected, participants who had their lucky charm in the room performed better, and reported a higher degree of ‘self-efficacy’ as before. But more than that, people who had their lucky charm in the room set higher goals, and also persisted longer in working on the task.
So there you go. Almost everyone has some kind of superstition (mine is that I should mention I noticed this study through my friends Vaughan Bell and Ed Yong on Twitter). What’s interesting is that superstition works, because it improves confidence, lets you set higher goals, and encourages you to work harder. In a lab. In one experiment. In a field riven with publication bias. You now know everything you need to decide if this applies to your life.