Superstitions and Performance in Sport

The psychological concept of "contagion" is based on the idea that an object somehow absorbs the qualities of its previous owner. This is why the majority of people would not want to wear a sweater worn by Adolf Hitler. They know logically that evil doesn't stick to a sweater, but something about wearing it makes them feel uncomfortable. It's not that people believe logically or consciously that contagion exists, but on some unconscious level, it effects the way that we feel about and use items that we know have been used by someone else.

Would you wear this sweater if you knew that Hitler had? (source)

For example, a recent study shows that contagion can lead to confidence, and ultimately superior performance in sport. The study was conducted by Undergraduate Charles Lee of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (UVA), and was intended to quantitatively measure the effect of contagion in golf. The study was conducted by assembling a group of 41 avid golfers, all of whom knew of putting expert Ben Curtis. The golfers were then broken into two groups; one group was given a "really nice" putter, and the other group was given a "putter owned by Ben Curtis" (the trick being that they were both given the same putter, which had never been used before by anyone.) Each subject was then told to make an identical series of putts. Low and behold, for every ten putts, the group that was putting with the "Ben Curtis putter" sank 1.5 more golf balls. The study was featured this month in PLoS ONE, an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science.

He's a hell of a putter, Ben Curtis. (source)

The most likely explanation for these results is the psychological phenomenon known as the "placebo effect" whereby results occur simply because someone thinks that they will. In other words, since the subject believed that they would putt better with Ben Curtis' putter, they did. However, that's not to dismiss that the reason that they believed that they'd putt better with it is because of contagion - that for some reason, the fact that Curtis had used it made it better than what it was. Both groups knew what kind of putter Ben Curtis had used, the only difference was that one group performed better because they thought that they were using his actual individual putter.

So if I were to break down the reasoning for these results, which the study never concluded, I would say this is the sequence: unconscious contagion --> placebo effect --> confidence --> improved performance. Positive contagion is something rarely seen in the world, the Hitler sweater is an example of negative contagion, and this clear example of it is a breakthrough in quantitatively measuring its effects.

Perhaps some day in the future, every amateur athlete will use equipment actually used by other athletes. Hopefully nobody is ever convinced that by buying Tiger Wood's old clothing they'll be able to... you know.