I don't talk about no-hitters while they're going on, I adjust my helmet after every pitch when I'm at bat, and I never (EVER) step on the baselines when I'm running out to my position or back to the dugout. That last one's a big one--I cringe whenever I see anyone step on the line, even if it's a coach running out for a mound visit. It's pathological. I don't quite jump like Turk Wendell used to, but I'm pretty close.
If you know me well, you know that my belief in superstitions is a huge departure from my usually hyper-rational approach to life. I'm not a religious guy at all, and I fully realize the irrationality of believing in jinxes and curses and magic. But maybe it's not irrational after all--thank you, Scientific American.
[Superstitious behavior] can veer from the eccentric to the pathological, and though many coaches, teammates and fans snicker and shake their heads, a new study headed by Lysann Damisch at the University of Cologne and recently published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that we should all stop smirking and start rubbing our rabbit’s foot...
[Experimenters] brought participants into the lab and told them that they would be doing a little golfing. They were to see how many of 10 putts they could make from the same location. The manipulation was simply this: when experimenters handed the golf ball to the participant they either mentioned that the ball “has turned out to be a lucky ball” in previous trials, or that the ball was simply the one “everyone had used so far”.
Remarkably, the mere suggestion that the ball was lucky significantly influenced performance, causing participants to make almost two more putts on average.Why? Surely it couldn’t be that the same golf ball becomes lucky at the experimenter’s suggestion – there must be an explanation grounded in the psychological influence that belief in lucky charms has on the superstitious...
A final study sought to determine exactly how the increased confidence that comes along with a lucky charm influences performance. Specifically, was it making participants set loftier goals for themselves? Was it increasing their persistence on the task? Turns out, it’s both. Participants in the charm-present conditions reported setting higher goals on an anagram task and demonstrated increased perseverance on the task (as measured by the amount of time they spent trying to solve it before asking for help).The article is one of those difficult-to-excerpt pieces (it rambles and rambles without ever making a pithy conclusion, sort of like me), so it's sort of helpful to read the whole thing. But to paraphrase their basic point, if you believe in a lucky charm, it will alter your psychology so that you set higher goals and persevere more, increasing your likelihood of success. You don't want to believe that your lucky charm is useless, so you go out of your way to make sure that it's lucky. Essentially. Okay, fine, it's not so easy to turn this one into a pithy conclusion, but you get the point.
But before you start hoarding rabbits' feet and four-leaf clovers, consider the author's final point.
The influence of the charm depends crucially on your belief in its inherent powers. Once you acknowledge that performance is a function of what goes on in your brain rather than a product of any mystical properties of the object itself, it becomes useless... Like the science of astronomy strips the starry night of its magic, the science of the mind strips your superstitions of their power. You’d be better off following the model of Walt Whitman: throw on your lucky fedora and forget you ever read this article.That last point might also help explain this phenomenon, which I had meant to post about but never got around to. If you believe in something, you need to keep believing in it no matter what, or else you could end up in big trouble. Which is why I never jump on baselines.
[Scientific American]
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