Claim, examined

Do lucky charms work? The study, the failed replication, and what survives

By Andrey Tadevosyan · Published 4 September 2026

Every tradition has its objects. A stone in the pocket, a sigil drawn and burned, a crystal on the desk, the number on the lock screen. The claim is that the object changes outcomes. The best-known experiment on that claim is a story in two acts, and the second act is the one nobody quotes.

Do lucky charms actually work?

One well-known 2010 study found that a lucky charm improved performance by raising confidence and persistence. A larger, preregistered replication in 2014 did not find the effect. The honest reading is that the result is fragile at best. A charm can still work as a cue for a state and an action; it has not been shown to change luck.

Act one

In 2010 a group of researchers ran a set of experiments that became famous quickly, because the result was so pleasing. Participants who were told a golf ball was lucky sank more putts. Participants allowed to keep their own lucky charm during a memory task did better on it. The proposed mechanism was not luck. It was self-efficacy: believing you had luck on your side raised confidence, and confidence raised persistence and performance.

That paper is the citation under most articles claiming science has proven talismans work. Read on its own it is a good paper with small samples, and small samples are where the second act begins.

Act two

Four years later, a preregistered replication with a much larger sample ran the golf study again, as closely to the original as the authors could manage.

This does not make the original authors wrong or dishonest. It makes the effect fragile, and fragile is the word to carry. An effect that appears in a small study and disappears in a large one is, most of the time, an effect that was never as large as it looked. The field this happened in has spent a decade learning that lesson about a great many pleasing results.

What the pair of results actually says

Put the two acts together and you get something more useful than either. The claim that a charm changes luck was never tested by either paper; both were about performance, which is inside the person. The claim that a charm raises confidence has some support and one loud failure. The claim that the mechanism, if there is one, runs through self-efficacy and persistence is the one part both sides would accept, and it is entirely ordinary. Nothing in either paper touches the outside world.

So a sigil, a crystal or a numbered pendant is, at most, a confidence cue with an unreliable effect size. That is not a dismissal. Confidence cues are useful, and a person is allowed to use one that happens to be beautiful. It is a dismissal of the sentence that usually comes next, that the object has a vibration or a field, for which there is no evidence at all.

Why the first result was so easy to believe

It is worth asking why a small study became a citation in a thousand articles before anyone checked it. Part of the answer is that the finding flattered everyone. Believers heard that science had confirmed the charm. Sceptics heard that the mechanism was confidence, not magic, which is what they had said all along. A result that lets both sides feel vindicated travels faster than one that corrects either, and it accumulates citations in proportion to how pleasant it is rather than how solid. The replication was less pleasant and travelled almost nowhere, which is why this page exists. Neither paper is the last word; the fair summary is that a real question was asked well, answered small, and then answered again larger with a different result.

The use that survives

The object can be a trigger. Seen on the desk, it recalls the goal; touched in the pocket, it interrupts the drift; picked up, it starts a small rehearsal of the next step and the thing in the way, and then the step itself. That chain, cue to rehearsal to plan to action, is where the evidence lives, and the 1089 essay and the protocol tool build a number into exactly that shape.

There is also a warning inside the fragility. A charm that becomes a condition, something you cannot perform without, has stopped being a cue and started being a dependency, and the affirmations essay describes what happens when a confidence device turns on the person using it. Use the object to start the action. Do not let it stand in for the action, and do not let it explain the result.

If you want to know whether your particular object does anything beyond reminding you, that is a question with a design: the same month with and without it, a criterion written first. The free 30-day experiment on this site holds the record.