To be most credible, scientists should not only be right, scientifically, but should be well-written. That said, a gentle reminder: the verb “lets” should not include an apostrophe.

It is natural for humans to be superstitious. For survival it is better to believe something bad is coming down and try and escape or defend yourself. If you are wrong you may seem silly, but if the crackling twig is a predatory creature then you are right. Being wrong in interpreting situations is far worse than ignoring a suspicion that cannot be supported by facts.

Recognising a superstitious response is helpful and should allow people to teach thme to understand and learn from their instinctive behaviours and not try to ignore them.

In the test conditions provided the subjects were put into a competitive situation. The instinct would be to stay and compete where you saw that you had an advantage, or to hide or withdraw where you perceived your chances were reduced. I think the tests were valid and maybe need expanding or more interpretation.

Yes, we just have to assume that those people who did better in the golf task aren’t golfers. I think it’s a relatively safe assumption if we’re willing to assume that the people doing this research aren’t stupid and actually have some training in how to do research. I don’t know them so they might be stupid and have no training in research and accidentally assigned a lot of golfers to the experimental condition. But it’s quite a safe bet that they didn’t. On a serious note, one way they could have eliminated this issue would have been to use the same participants in the lucky ball and neutral conditions, but that solution would have had its own complications.

Stitcheroo:

You said: “To then say that the results are confirmed by ‘all the other significant results’ is a leap of faith”. I have to disagree with that quite strongly. Replication is a foundation of experimentation. The golf experiment on its own would not have been publishable, even the authors treat it as a preliminary finding. They then do variations on the experiment showing the same effect in each. This is the exact opposite of taking a leap of faith, it is to subject a hypothesis to systematic inquiry and is the gold standard in any field of science.

As a disclaimer I should say that I’m not affiliated with this research in any way, and know nothing about research into superstition and have no strong opinions on that literature. I’m just trying to defend what seems on the surface like a relatively solid piece of research against some far fetched critique.

As for good luck charms… well, that’s just a different shaped teddy bear, really, isn’t it? ;p

“Rogue Medic: I’m not sure why you’d want to eliminate the effects of state of mind in a study which is specifically interested in manipulating state of mind. Recall that this study shows that superstitious belief influences state of mind to such a degree as to affect various types of cognitive and motor performance.”

I like to control for variables as much as possible. As with homeopathy, full moon effects, and other superstitions, I think it is important to make clear that this is purely a placebo effect.

Too many people already believe in these things. I wouldn’t want a study that could be easily misinterpreted as suggesting there is any kind of non-placebo effect of superstitions.

“The researchers do briefly discuss negative effects of superstition in their conclusion. They acknowledge that negative superstitions could have adverse effects, and that it would be interesting to study. However that was not their chosen focus”

I have not read the paper. I caddied in high school, so I think more of the negative performance effect of any psychological stimulus in golf, than the positive. It takes so little for a good game to fall apart. Think of Greg Norman as described by Malcolm Gladwell.

“The Art of Failure
Why some people choke and others panic.”

www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_08_21_a_choking.htm

Stitcheroo: I like in principle your idea of controlling for possesion of familiar objects. However, if it turned out that being in possesion of a family photo was equally helpful to being in possesion of a lucky charm, this would suggest that a lucky charm (associated with superstitious belief) has influence equal to a family photo (associated with emotional value?), and would extend the conclusions put forward by the authors, not undermine them.

Rogue Medic: I’m not sure why you’d want to eliminate the effects of state of mind in a study which is specifically interested in manipulating state of mind. Recall that this study shows that superstitious belief influences state of mind to such a degree as to affect various types of cognitive and motor performance.

There were not 23 students who believed in luck. The paper mentions that 80% of the participant *population* believed in good luck (as revealed by a pretest), not 80% of the *sample*. But supposing you were right and 23 believed in luck while 5 didn't. And suppose further that the 5 did perform better, and suppose again that they all somehow ended up in the group which performed better, and let's go the whole way and also suppose that if those 5 participants' scores were removed the significant difference would disappear. That's a hell of a lot of supposing. You can speculate that that's the case, but unless you show it to be the case you are not justified in dismissing the results here. Particularly in light of all the other significant results.

You say we need to see all the factors that might be affecting performance. You ask the impossible, particularly where individuals are concerned, with our many and varied motivations and capacities. But rather than attempting the impossible, what we do, and what the researchers here have shown, is to attack a problem from multiple angles, with multiple, random groups of participants. H. E. Pennypacker has already made this point. When the same effect is seen many times, in different but related ways, with many groups of people randomly selected, it is reasonable to conclude that all those factors you want to be controlled are not having a significant effect. Except if one or more of those factors could be shown to be conflated with superstition in *each* of the 4 experiments.

So, is there anything in particular which may account for each of the results which the researchers have allegedly confused with superstition causing increased self-efficacy?

Ah, KFN-7, “the doubter”. I’ll have you know you Numerological Focusing is a true science based on ancient principles. I have learnt of its … oh, you’re right, I just made it up. I wanted to start a new pseudo science and make a load of money without having to work hard. I had tried the Doctrine of Signatures but didn’t get taken seriously when I told people I could cure them of leaves. I still think Numerological Focusing has legs (KFN-11)