In a follow-up experiment the researchers hypothesized that this kind of magical thinking can actually increase participants’ confidence in their own capabilities. That is, believing in lucky charms would increase participants’ “self-efficacy,” and it is this feeling of “I can do this,” not any magical properties of the object itself, that predict success. To test this, they had participants bring in their own lucky charms from home and assigned them to either a condition where they would be performing a task in the presence of their charm, or a condition where the experimenter removes the charm from the room before the task. Participants rated their perceived level of self-efficacy and then completed a memory task that was essentially a variant of the game Concentration.
Confirmed: Good luck charms work
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