Reality Upgrade

Belief is a powerful thing, and it is amazing how subconscious expectations can affect our performance on so many levels. Simply by believing that a given outcome is going to happen drastically improves the likelihood of that outcome. I have talked about this before, in the context of body language.

This article from Bad Science talks about an amazing study on the effects of lucky charms. Test subjects were given a series of tests along the lines of this one: One group was given a golf ball and told that it was the “lucky ball” and the other group was given a ball that “everyone uses”. The test was to get a hole in one at 100 cm, with 10 tries per subject. The group with the “lucky ball” performed more than 35% better on the test, with an average of 6.42 versus an average of 4.75 for the group with the ball “everyone uses”.

The article talks about quite a few more tests, but the results all seem to indicate that our subconscious beliefs really do influence reality.

Cool, huh?