MEichel Norton studied psychology and was a fellow at the MIT Media Lab before becoming a professor of management at Harvard Business School. Known for her research on behavioral economics and happiness, Norton has published her first book. Happy Money: The New Science of smarter spending, with Elizabeth Dunn in 2013. In his latest work, The power of ritual: The transformative power of our everyday actionsPublished on April 18th, Norton spent more than a decade surveying thousands of people about the role of ritual in their lives.
Ritual seems to be a difficult subject for scientific study. How do you classify them and measure their effectiveness?
It felt very daunting at first. You can't randomly assign people to families, have them perform different rituals, and then follow them for 12 years. At first, I thought I would study commonplace things like weddings and funerals, but when I researched people, I realized that they had families, lovers, people at work, and everything else that they had made up for themselves. That opened up a lot of doors. You can observe this type of ritual to see when people do it. We can measure their emotions and really start to understand how these things are affecting us in our lives.
So what are they doing? What do you mean by “ritual effect”?
One thing rituals do is help release emotions that are otherwise difficult to release. For example, going to the Grand Canyon can leave you in awe and wonder, but going there every day is difficult. Therefore, we use these rituals to help us feel in different ways. We use them to deal with sadness, to motivate ourselves, to calm ourselves, or whatever we need in the moment.
Is that what distinguishes ritual from habit, the emotional component?
That's the big part. While we describe habits as the “what” you do, rituals are the things you build around. Perform everyday activities such as tying your shoelaces. It's boring, but when tennis players do it a certain way, it feels like they can go out and play at Wimbledon. Therefore, rituals bring emotion and meaning.
You write that rituals can also strengthen or create a sense of identity.
Think about your family at dinner. At a very basic level, they're spending calories on their faces. But when a family eats a cake that their great-grandmother made, it's a connection to the past and a sense of “who we are as a family.”
Do you think there is something deep within the human brain that draws us to rituals?
There are neuroscience theories about this, but from my perspective as a behavioral scientist, there are very few things that humans use in all situations in response to a variety of problems, and rituals are one of them. I think that suggests that there is something within us that tends toward ritual. If you go back thousands of years, you'll find evidence that we were doing things like that, too, such as ritual burials.
Why do so many top athletes and musicians rely on pre-performance rituals?
This is one of the most fun things to study. Research shows that the more stressful things become, the more likely we are to engage in ritualistic behavior. I have stress in my life, but not like Beyoncé. It would look very strange if I performed an elaborate ritual like hers before teaching a class. Culturally, we allow people who do very stressful things to perform elaborate rituals without really criticizing them. Research shows they can also help make you a little less reactive to mistakes during performance.
According to your research, how important are rituals in romantic relationships?
Sometimes people ask me, “What's your favorite ritual you've ever encountered?” There are many, but my favorite is this couple who clink their forks three times before eating. When I say that to the audience, they immediately say, “ah,”. Our study found that rituals function as signals of commitment (although we are not entirely sure whether couples who are already in love are more likely to engage in rituals; we do not know for certain whether there is a causal relationship. (It's hard to tell the arrows apart). We can get married and sign papers of commitment, but it's these small actions we've been doing over the years that make us realize, This is who we are, this is who we are, and this is what we will continue to do.” I’m doing this.” And it's often very upsetting when couples stop clinking their forks.
What about rituals in family relationships?
Families who report having rituals before and after holidays are more likely to report feeling closer to each other and are more likely to get together on holidays. So there are solid features that pull us back. I don't know if loving families are as likely to perform rituals as couples are, but there's something there.
Ritual is not always beneficial and can be harmful on both an individual and societal level.
On a personal level, it can be really disappointing when rituals are interrupted. And if ritual becomes too central, it can start to interfere. And we see problems there, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, where the ritual becomes an end in itself. Instead of checking to see if the door is locked to get on with your day, checking becomes an end in itself, and you end up not getting the work you were supposed to do done.
At the societal level, rituals can unite as well as divide.
I gave a class the other day, and we often have a ritual where we have everyone stand up and clap, which is really fun, but it gets really annoying when someone clap at the wrong time. I look like that. If it happened in a fabricated ritual, then on a broader level, when history, culture, and tradition come into play, you can see how even minor differences can become real points of contention.
What do you hope people get out of this book?
I really like noticing things that people are already doing. It's like you're laughing at yourself a little bit, but then when you do it, it has a different resonance. Because that's what you owned. your ritual. And I want to encourage people to experiment. If you don't have a ritual before a big stressful presentation, try something. If that doesn't work, that's fine, but I like the idea of being able to try these tools and see if they help.
