Gandhi family scion Rahul Gandhi often wears his father Rajiv's kurta whenever he visits his constituency Amethi in Uttar Pradesh.Priyanka Vadra usually wears her grandmother Indira Gandhi's sari whenever she tours Amethi.
Cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar usually wears a pad given to him by his brother on his right leg before a match. Even if he has to change his pad during a match, Sachin ensures that he wears his brother's gift pad for sometime.And avid cricket fans are well aware about Sourav Ganguly's ‘lucky' red handkerchief, and Azharuddin's black and Zaheer Khan's yellow scarves.
Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty wears watches on both her wrists whenever her IPL team plays.Quirky, will you call it, or lucky charm? Even the most powerful man in the world Barack Obama has his set of lucky charms, that includes a Hanuman too. Good luck charms are a fun way to make yourself feel luckier. A positive attitude is a great way to improve your luck and help you win more sweepstakes.
Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan wears the wristwatch gifted to him by his father wristwatch even to this day. Amitabh Bachchan wore the blue sapphire when things began going downhill for his career owing to which he made a comeback with Kaun Banega Crorepati. The opal and emeralds are for his health to improve.
Salman Khan has a bracelet, which he wears at all times and credits it for protecting him.
Akshay Kumar was a flop in Bollywood when he met his lucky charm – wife Twinkle Khanna.
Obama has a statuette of Madonna with her child and a bracelet worn by a US soldier in Iraq as lucky charms.
Good luck charms are a fun way to make yourself feel luckier. A positive attitude is a great way to improve your luck and help you win more sweepstakes.
Can luck really influence the outcome of events? That question has captivated otherwise rational people for centuries—and challenged scientists to somehow prove whether lucky charms, special shirts or ritualistic behaviors hold special powers.They do. (Sometimes.) New research coming out in June suggests that a belief in good luck can affect performance.
In a test conducted by researchers from the University of Cologne, Germany , participants on a putting green who were told they were playing with a "lucky ball" sank 6.4 putts out of 10, nearly two more putts, on average, than those who weren't told the ball was lucky. That is a 35% improvement, reports The Wall Street Journal. The results suggest new thinking in how to view luck and are intriguing to behavorial psychologists.
"Our results suggest that the activation of a superstition can indeed yield performance-improving effects," says Lysann Damisch, co-author of the Cologne study, set to be published in the journal Psychological Science. The sample size, just 28 university students, was small, but the effect was big enough to be statistically significant.
Believing in their own good fortune can help people only in situations where they can affect the outcome. It can't, say, help people watching a horse race they have bet on.
While the findings have not been published, this study could prompt psychologists to explore ways to tap into people's belief in good luck. "Simply being told this is a lucky ball is sufficient to affect performance," Stuart Vyse, professor of psychology at Connecticut College and author of "Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition," says of the new study.
But the figures will also be an encouragement for the millions who cling to a lucky shirt or ring on special occasions to bring them fortune.Celebrities have often admitted relying on a lucky charm. Cameron Diaz has a necklace given to her by a friend because she thinks it will ward off the effects of aging. Julie Walters kept a lucky piece of coal in her bag during one Oscars ceremony.
Atonement star James McAvoy says 'white rabbit' on the first of every month to the first person he sees - because his grandmother taught him that it brings good luck.
Lysann Damisch, co-author of the study, set to be published in the journal Psychological Science in June, said: 'Our results suggest that the activation of a superstition can indeed yield performance-improving effects.'
Stuart Vyse, professor of psychology at Connecticut College, added: 'Simply being told this is a lucky ball is sufficient to affect performance.' athematicians have demonstrated in the past the role that randomness plays in people's lives, but this has not stopped many believing the opposite.
A recent survey found that 77 per cent of people were at least a little superstitious and/or engaged in some form of superstitious behaviour. A total of 42 per cent said that they were 'very or somewhat' superstitious.
Peter Thall, a biostatistician at the University of Texas, said: 'The idea that wearing a red shirt, saying some sort of incantation or prayer or carrying a lucky charm will bring good luck is very appealing because it gives people the illusion that they have some degree of control over future events in their lives.''The painful truth is that we have little or no control over the most important events in our lives.' Sometimes, however, people overestimate how much control they have over their lives.
A team of British researchers in 2003 asked 107 traders at investment banks to play a game simulating a live stock exchange. They were told that pressing the letters Z, X and C on the keyboard 'may have some effect on the index,' when in fact it didn't.
Traders in the study who held this false belief the strongest had lower salaries, indicating the idea they made their own luck could be harming their decisions.
