Can Serena Williams’s tennis racquet make me a better tennis player? Beliefs about Ability Contagion in Children and Adults
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".