Can Serena Williams’s tennis racquet make me a better tennis player? Beliefs about Ability Contagion in Children and Adults

Abstract

We examined U.S. and Canadian children’s (n = 214) and adults’ (n = 72) belief in ability contagion – an expected improvement in performance when using a celebrity’s object (e.g., superior tennis skills when using Serena Williams’s racquet). Four- to 7-year-olds preferred using a celebrity to a non-celebrity object, but their performance on a related task did not differ depending on which object they used (Study 1). Adults and 5- to 8-year-olds expected that a celebrity object would lead to superior performance in a forced-choice paradigm (Study 2), but not when given the option to state that the objects were the same (Study 3), even though adults and older children (> 7.01 years) judged the celebrity object to have an enhanced worth. We find that participants do not believe in ability contagion using either implicit or explicit measures. We discuss implications of our results for versions of contagion accounts of celebrity objects.