The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions

by Dr Michael Norton

Going to bed—a goal that had once involved a handful of dull but functional actions such as flossing and plugging my phone in—became over time a roughly seventeen-step ritual enacted with one goal: to get my child to go to sleep.

The catalyst of all rituals is the need; tradition and ancestry are not required.

Ritual, I was coming to understand, could be an individually designed experience.

I learned that the best way to answer what ritual is is by investigating what ritual is not: a ritual is not a habit.

Habit is the what. It’s something we do:

A ritual is not just the action but the particular way we enact it—the how.

Good habits automate us, helping us get things done. Rituals animate us, enhancing and enchanting our lives with something more.

In a series of experiments in which they randomly gave people such items as mugs, chocolate, and baseball tickets, the scientists proved that merely owning something causes us to value that item more than we would if it weren’t already ours. People are willing to pay more to keep the mug they already own than to buy an identical one they don’t. No one needs an extra mug, but once we are endowed with it—once we own it—we are loath to part with it, much the same way I can’t quite bring myself to part with my unprepossessing artwork.

noticed extreme online rancor directed at parents of new babies who were using the SNOO—a contraption that rocks your baby to sleep so you don’t have to.

oh no the baby sleep discourse continues

“the relationship between what people are doing and what people think they’re doing.”

Wegner’s research shows that, when possible, we prefer the higher-level identification. If you ask someone what they’re doing, they’re more likely to say “Making the sign of the cross” than “Tapping myself four times,” even if the latter is technically just as true.

But when our best-laid plans do go awry and our most rigorously rehearsed performances fall flat, rituals can do different work, helping us cope with feelings of disappointment and defeat.

The emotional satisfaction I derive from a simple slice at Regina’s is an example of what I have termed conceptual consumption. I’m eating the piece of pizza—a mix of nutrients such as whole grains and calcium—but that act stretches back in time and allows me to experience so much more: emotions and aspirations, memories and nostalgia.

Consumption can also be a profoundly meaningful way of tapping into the repertoire of resources that make up our cultural tool kit—sometimes by using those resources in time-honored ways, other times by using them to improvise something utterly new.

I was caught in what the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner called the “betwixt and between” period, the liminal space between two identities at work—a junior peon and a senior guru—and I didn’t know how to act.

tbh this is how I feel in any vague leadership position

Deadnaming conveys that a transition that is deeply meaningful to the person means nothing to you.

Across cultures and across time, people report feeling different, changed, and transformed after undergoing rites of passage. Sometimes the initiation is a combination of preexisting and novel rituals, and other times, it is a traditional ritual performed at an untraditional time.

As ritual scholar Ronald Grimes puts it, “The primary work of a rite of passage is to ensure that we attend to such events fully, which is to say, spiritually, psychologically and socially. Unattended, a major life passage can become a yawning abyss, draining off psychic energy, engendering social confusion, and twisting the course of the life that follows it. Unattended passages become spiritual sinkholes around which hungry ghosts, those greedy personifications of unfinished business, hover.”

Shared reality does not imply sharing beliefs, as when we vote for the same candidate or belong to the same religious group or root for the same soccer team. It’s perceiving the world in the same way as another person—finding the same joke funny, say, or processing events with the same thoughts and feelings.

I do think there's a correlation to politics though, such is why I find it baffling when ostensibly liberal people are married to conservatives as there are diametrically opposed realities in those perspectives.

relationship rituals are exclusive. People are often furious when they discover that a ritual they thought was unique to their relationship is being practiced in a new relationship.

Our final, most heartbreaking, insight about relationship rituals came when we realized that consensus was a critical factor.

At the most basic functional level of many of our family rituals, what is really happening? Logistics management. Holiday rituals coordinate us.

Somewhat ironically, though, family cohesion is rarely a group endeavor. It is often the product of the work of just one or two people: the kinkeepers.

kinkeepers are the glue that holds it all together. Families with kinkeepers are more likely to see extended-family members and more likely to gather for important celebrations. The siblings of kinkeepers also stay in closer contact with one another.

Once the funeral ends, after everyone drives and flies back home, we are left with our loss, and people expect us to head back to work. Literally. The United States has no law requiring bereavement leave.

best country in the world! /s

This is the power of group rituals: they can spark the phenomenon Émile Durkheim called collective effervescence. Even a series of random actions, performed together, can turn a gathering of strangers into a meaningful unit.

Some Wal-Mart employees enact a ritual at the start of each of their shifts: “Give me a W! Give me an A! Give me an L! Give me a squiggly! Give me an M! Give me an A! Give me an R! Give me a T!”—followed by “Whose Wal-Mart is it? It’s my Wal-Mart.” The instructions specify that when the “squiggly” moment arrives, all employees—in unison—must shimmy their hips. No wonder the meetings have been described as “two parts militaristic, one part kumbaya.”

always felt weird to do lol

Can a shimmy and a squiggly really change employees’ experience at work for the better?

maybe for all of us employees to roll our eyes at ..

Eye rolling in lockstep with other employees during a particularly embarrassing, boss-mandated ritual is a synchronized group behavior that has many of the elements of an effective group ritual.

Nellie Bowles

Bari Weiss:s life and TFP partner

We do have a built-in fail-safe for helping us keep our anger at them in check: we’re members of many, many groups, and so who they are is constantly in flux.

An apology that begins with “I’m sorry if you were somehow hurt by my actions” is a failure to take responsibility and admit fault. It’s not an admission that the behavior was wrong; it’s an implication that the person offended is overreacting.

and yet, a very common apology mistake!