Do you have a lucky object? Maybe it is a necklace you wear when you need a little extra confidence, a particular pen you use for important meetings, or a shirt that somehow became your lucky shirt because something good happened the last few times you wore it. Perhaps you knock on wood, cross your fingers, avoid walking under ladders, or have a particular routine you follow before doing something difficult.

The funny thing is that you may know perfectly well that the object isn’t actually lucky, but you bring it anyway. Humans have been carrying charms, performing rituals, and trying to persuade luck to cooperate with us for a very long time. Different cultures have developed beliefs about objects, numbers, colors, gestures, and behaviors that bring either good or bad fortune, while many of us create our own personal superstitions almost accidentally.

On the surface, superstition doesn’t make much sense. Carrying a particular object in your pocket shouldn’t change whether you sink a golf putt, pass an exam, or nail a presentation. But there is another possibility worth considering: perhaps the object doesn’t change what is happening around you, but sometimes it changes something about you.

That is where the science gets interesting.

A Little Bit of Magic in Your Pocket

In 2010, researchers Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler conducted a series of experiments examining what happened when familiar good-luck superstitions were activated before people completed different tasks. In one experiment, participants completed a golfing task after being given a ball. Some were told that the ball had been “lucky” for previous participants, and those participants performed better than people who were simply handed a ball without the lucky suggestion.

The researchers also asked participants in another experiment to bring a personal lucky charm with them. Some were allowed to keep the charm nearby while completing tasks, while others had their charms temporarily removed. The participants who had their lucky charms with them reported greater confidence in their ability to perform the tasks, and the researchers found evidence that this increased sense of self-efficacy was associated with greater persistence.

The researchers weren’t suggesting that the objects had somehow altered reality. Instead, they proposed that activating a superstition affected how people approached the task. If you believe you are capable of succeeding, you may be more willing to persist when something becomes difficult, and that difference in behavior can sometimes influence the outcome.

In other words, the charm didn’t necessarily change the odds. It may have changed the person holding it.

Let’s Not Turn Psychology Into More Woo

This is where we need to be careful, because research like this is incredibly easy to transform into something it doesn’t actually say. I can already imagine the social media headline: Scientists prove lucky charms rewire your brain for success! Suddenly we would be talking about dopamine, neuroplasticity, and mysterious brain regions lighting up even though none of those things were actually tested.

We don’t need to do that. The psychological explanation is interesting enough on its own. Confidence can influence behavior, and behavior can influence outcomes. If carrying a familiar object makes someone feel more capable, that person may approach a difficult situation differently or persist longer than they otherwise would.

That is very different from saying the object itself contains luck. It is also important to remember that one research program doesn’t establish that lucky charms always improve performance. The 2010 experiments provide evidence for an effect under particular experimental conditions, not a universal law of superstition.

This is one of the things I want to be particularly careful about throughout this series. If we’re going to question extraordinary claims about magic, manifestation, intuition, and superstition, then we should apply that same skepticism when someone puts the word neuroscience in front of an explanation. A scientific-sounding explanation isn’t automatically a good one.

Why Does Uncertainty Make Us Reach for Magic?

Superstitions seem particularly at home in situations where we care about the outcome but can’t completely control it. You can practice for thousands of hours and still lose a game. You can prepare meticulously for an interview and still have no control over who else applies. You can study for an exam without knowing exactly which questions will appear.

These situations have something important in common: effort matters, but effort cannot guarantee the outcome. That uncertainty can be uncomfortable, particularly when the outcome matters to us.

Psychologists studying what is known as compensatory control have examined our desire to experience the world as structured and orderly. When our sense of personal control is threatened, we may become more attracted to patterns, systems, or explanations that restore a sense of order. That doesn’t mean every ritual or superstition is caused by a loss of control, but it offers one useful way of understanding why magical thinking can become particularly appealing when circumstances feel unpredictable.

A ritual also gives us something concrete to do. You may not be able to control whether your team wins, but you can wear the same jersey you wore during the last victory. You can’t control every question you will be asked during a presentation, but you can drink from your favorite mug before you begin. You can’t guarantee that a job interview will go well, but you can put the lucky stone in your pocket.

The ritual creates a small area of predictability inside a situation that isn’t entirely predictable. Even if it doesn’t control the outcome, the familiarity itself may have value.

How a Superstition Is Born

The beginning of a personal superstition can be surprisingly ordinary. Imagine that you wear a particular pair of earrings to an important presentation, and the presentation goes beautifully. The next time you have something important to do, you notice the earrings in your jewelry box and remember what happened the last time you wore them.

So you wear them again, and perhaps that event goes well too. Now you have the beginning of a pattern.

Humans are very good at detecting associations, and that ability is essential for learning. If one event reliably predicts another, recognizing that relationship can help us navigate the world. The difficulty is that two things can happen together without one causing the other.

Your earrings and your successful presentation occurred at the same time, but that doesn’t mean the earrings caused your success. Maybe you were well prepared. Maybe the audience was receptive. Maybe you slept particularly well the night before. Maybe you are simply good at what you do, or maybe some combination of circumstances happened to work in your favor.

“I wore these earrings and then something good happened,” however, is a wonderfully simple story for the mind to remember. Once we begin to associate the earrings with success, confirmation bias can help reinforce the story. We notice occasions when the lucky object appears to work while paying less attention to occasions when it doesn’t.

Over time, an entirely ordinary object can accumulate a surprisingly powerful personal history.

Ritual Isn’t Necessarily Superstition

There is another distinction worth making because not every ritual is superstitious. You probably have rituals you would never describe as magical. Maybe you make coffee the same way every morning, listen to a particular playlist while working, light a candle before writing, or follow the same sequence when preparing for a presentation.

Rituals can provide structure, mark transitions, connect us with other people, and carry cultural or personal meaning. A familiar routine can also become associated with a particular activity. Lighting a candle before writing, for example, doesn’t require believing that the candle produces creativity. It may simply become part of the transition into writing time.

The difference becomes more interesting when we start assigning causal power to the ritual. Making tea because it is part of your writing routine is one thing. Believing you literally cannot write successfully unless you drink from one particular mug adds another layer to the story.

Of course, human beliefs rarely fit into perfectly neat categories. Sometimes we know perfectly well that an object isn’t magical and still don’t particularly want to risk leaving it at home.

When You Know Better but Knock on Wood Anyway

This may be one of my favorite things about superstition. We can understand probability and coincidence while simultaneously behaving as though a superstition might be true.

Psychologist Jane Risen has studied this phenomenon and describes how people can recognize that a belief is irrational while still going along with the intuitive response it produces. Our reflective judgment may tell us one thing while another part of us remains reluctant to tempt fate.

Imagine telling someone, “I’ve never had a flat tire in my life.” You know that knocking on wood has no demonstrated ability to influence the condition of your tires, but suddenly finding the nearest wooden surface seems like a perfectly reasonable precaution.

Part of the appeal may simply be that the cost is so small. Crossing your fingers costs nothing. Knocking on wood takes a second. Carrying Grandma’s necklace in your pocket doesn’t interfere with your day. If the ritual feels reassuring, there may be very little motivation to resist it.

That doesn’t demonstrate that the superstition works. It demonstrates that human belief is more complicated than dividing everything into things we believe and things we don’t. We can hold skepticism and superstition at the same time.

When Lucky Stops Feeling Lucky

Most everyday superstitions are harmless, but it is worth acknowledging that rituals can occupy very different places in people’s lives. Carrying a lucky object because it makes you feel a little more confident is very different from feeling convinced that something terrible will happen unless you perform an exact sequence of behaviors.

It is also important not to casually equate ordinary superstition with obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD is a mental health condition involving obsessions and/or compulsions that can cause significant distress or impairment. It isn’t simply being superstitious, liking routines, or wanting things arranged a certain way.

That distinction is another reminder that rituals themselves aren’t inherently good, bad, rational, or irrational. They can be cultural, religious, social, comforting, playful, habitual, or deeply personal. What matters is the meaning we attach to them and the role they play in our lives.

So, Is Your Lucky Charm Actually Lucky?

Science isn’t particularly well equipped to tell you whether an object possesses supernatural significance. What researchers can investigate is what happens to people when they believe something is lucky, and there is evidence suggesting that activating good-luck beliefs can sometimes influence confidence, persistence, and performance.

There is also a larger body of psychological research suggesting that humans seek patterns, meaning, and structure, particularly when circumstances feel uncertain. That doesn’t mean your rabbit’s foot controls the universe, but it does suggest something I find much more interesting: the meaning we assign to an object can influence how we interact with the world around us.

An ordinary object can become connected to memories of success, people we love, places we’ve been, or versions of ourselves we want to remember. Holding that object might remind us that we have done difficult things before. A familiar ritual might make an uncertain moment feel a little more familiar.

Maybe your lucky charm doesn’t contain magic. Maybe some of what feels magical comes from everything you have attached to it over time: memories, confidence, comfort, expectation, and meaning.

If slipping a stone into your pocket before a difficult day reminds you that you’ve got this, I’m not particularly interested in taking it away from you. I just wouldn’t give the stone all the credit.

Next Time: Under a Spell

Next week, we’re moving from good luck to something considerably darker. If our expectations can sometimes influence how we approach an experience, what happens when those expectations are negative? What happens when someone expects pain, illness, or something bad to happen?

That brings us to the nocebo effect, the less famous and much spookier relative of the placebo effect. Researchers have found that negative expectations can influence symptoms and experiences such as pain, which raises an intriguing spooky-season question: can believing that something will hurt you actually make you feel worse?

Next week, we’ll find out what science can—and can’t—tell us about being under a curse.

References & Further Reading

Damisch, L., Stoberock, B., & Mussweiler, T. (2010). Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance. Psychological Science, 21(7), 1014–1020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610372631

Dudley, R. T. (1999). The effect of superstitious belief on performance following an unsolvable problem. Personality and Individual Differences, 26(6), 1057–1064. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(98)00209-8

Hamerman, E. J., & Morewedge, C. K. (2015). Reliance on luck: Identifying which achievement goals elicit superstitious behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(3), 323–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214565055

Kay, A. C., Whitson, J. A., Gaucher, D., & Galinsky, A. D. (2009). Compensatory control: Achieving order through the mind, our institutions, and the heavens. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(5), 264–268.

Risen, J. L. (2016). Believing what we do not believe: Acquiescence to superstitious beliefs and other powerful intuitions. Psychological Review, 123(2), 182–207. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000017