michael Norton studied psychology and was a fellow at the MIT Media Lab before becoming professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Known for his research on behavioral economics and well-being, Norton published his first book, Happy Money: The New Science of Smarter spendingwith Elizabeth Dunnin 2013. For his latest, The ritual effect: the transformative power of our everyday actionson April 18, Norton has spent more than a decade surveying thousands of people about the role of ritual in their lives.
Rituals seem a difficult subject for scientific study. How do you categorize them and measure their effect?
It felt very scary at first because you can’t randomly assign people to families and have them do different rituals and then follow up in 12 years. I would study obvious things like weddings and funerals first, but when we surveyed people, we found that they had all these other things that they made up – in their families, with a partner, with people at work. It opened it up a lot. We can look at these kinds of rituals and see when people do them. We can measure their emotions, we can really start to establish about what these things are doing in our lives.
So what do they do? What is the “ritual effect”, as you call it?
One of the things rituals do is help us unlock emotions that might otherwise be difficult to unlock. You can experience awe or wonder if you’re going to the Grand Canyon, for example, but it’s hard to go there every day. And so we use these rituals to help us feel in different ways. We use them to deal with grief, to strengthen ourselves, to calm ourselves, or whatever we need in the moment.
Is it what distinguishes rituals from habits – the emotional component?
That’s a big part of it. We describe habits as the “what”, as the thing you are busy with, while rituals are what you build around it. Take an everyday action like tying your shoes. It’s boring, and yet, when a tennis player does it a certain way, they feel like they can go out and play at Wimbledon. Rituals therefore bring emotion and meaning.
You write that rituals can also strengthen or even create a sense of identity.
Think of families at dinner. At a very basic level, they are throwing calories in their faces. But when families eat a cake that their great grandmother made, it is a connection to the past and a sense of “who we are as a family”.
Do you think there is something deep in the human brain that draws us to ritual?
There is some neuroscience about this, but from my perspective as a behavioral scientist, there are very few things that people use in every situation, in response to various problems, and ritual is one of them. I think it indicates that there is something inside of us that turns to ritual. Go back thousands of years and you can find evidence that we did that too – ceremonial burials, for example.
Why do so many top athletes and musicians rely on rituals before performing?
It is one of the most enjoyable things to study. There is research that shows that as things become more stressful, we are more likely to behave in ritualistic ways. I have stress in my life, but not like Beyoncé has stress, and I would look really weird if I did her elaborate rituals before teaching a class. Culturally, we allow people who do very stressful things to do elaborate rituals without really judging them. Research shows that they also help us to react a little less to our mistakes during a performance.
From your research, how important are rituals in romantic relationships?
Sometimes people ask, “What’s your favorite ritual you’ve come across?” And there are many, but my favorite is this couple who said they clap their forks three times before eating. When I say that to an audience, there’s an instant “Awwwww“. We do see in our research that rituals serve as a sign of commitment (we don’t fully know whether couples who already love each other are more likely to engage in rituals – the causal arrows are hard to tease apart). You can get married and sign papers to show that you are committed, but day by day it is these small actions that we have been doing for years that indicate “we are in this, this is us, we are going to keep doing this”. And when couples stop sounding forks, it’s often very upsetting.
What about rituals in family relationships?
Families who report having rituals around holidays are more likely to say they feel close, and they are more likely to gather for those holidays. So there is a cementing function that pulls us back. As with couples, we don’t know if families who love each other are more likely to develop rituals, but there is something there.
Rituals are not always beneficial, they can be harmful on both individual and social levels.
On the individual level, if a ritual is interrupted, it can really throw us off. And as rituals become too central, they can begin to interfere. And this is where we see issues like obsessive compulsive disorder, where the ritual itself becomes the goal. Instead of checking to see if the door is locked so you can get on with your day, checking becomes the goal itself and you end up not doing the thing you were meant to do.
At a societal level, rituals can divide as well as unite.
I was teaching a class the other day, and I often do this thing where I get everyone to stand up and do a made-up ritual that involves clapping, and it’s a lot of fun, but if someone claps at the wrong time, it looks people very annoyed. If this happens with a made-up ritual, you can see how, on a broader level, when history and culture and tradition come into play, even minor differences can become a real bone of contention.
What do you hope people get from the book?
I really like it when people notice the things they are already doing. It’s almost like you’re laughing at yourself a little bit, but from then on, when you do, it has a different resonance because you’ve owned it – it’s your ritual. And I want to encourage people to experiment. If you don’t have a ritual before your big stressful presentation, try something. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s fine, but I like the idea of having these tools that we can experiment with and see if they can help us.
