Rituals Without Religion (with Michael Norton)

Michael Norton: Russ, thanks so much for having me.

Michael Norton: That’s right. I think that sometimes we use the word habit to refer to ritual. Sometimes we use ritual to refer to habit, and so we have been trying in our research to tease apart really what are the differences between these. And, I do think, as you said, that it ends up being quite important.

So, for me, habits and routines are things that are a bit dry. They’re unemotional. They are tasks that we need to get done, and when we do them, we can check them off our list. And good habits are great. I’m not anti-habit in any way. I should have better habits; I should exercise more and things like that. But, they are kind of a box-checking exercise, often.

Rituals, I think, are a bit more emotional and a bit more meaningful. They have more in them than just checking off a box. And, a silly example that I use, but I do think it highlights something, is if I ask people, ‘Do you brush your teeth first and then shower or do you shower and then brush your teeth?’ First off, weirdly, about half of people do one and half of people do the other. But, the important thing is if I say, ‘Hey, tomorrow morning or tonight before you go to bed, could you switch the order?’ And, about half of people say, ‘Sure, no problem.’ And, what would you say?

Michael Norton: It would be weird. They say, ‘Weird, odd, I don’t want to.’ And, if I say, ‘Why?’ they say, ‘I don’t know exactly, but I don’t want to.’ And, for me, that’s starting to get the difference between a habit and a ritual. So, if you can flip the order of those, they’re habits, they’re tasks, you got to clean your face, you got to clean your body, whatever. But, if the order matters to you, if for some reason you feel like, ‘Mm, I’d rather do that than that, than that,’ it’s starting to be a bit more ritualistic, bcause you can feel emotion in you as you think about it in a way that you might not with habits.

Now when I say ritual, I don’t mean people in robes with candles. That’s very far down the continuum from habit to ritual. But, as soon as we start to have that extra emotion, that feeling, that meaning, that preference to do it one way versus the other, I think we’re moving toward more ritualistic and away from kind of a dry habit.

Michael Norton: That’s far down the continuum, I think, for sure. But, even with something, for example, like how you brush your teeth, it turns out that we have preferences for that. So, if you think of brushing your teeth, if you do it next time, you start in the same place, you do things, you end in the same place; and that also feels good. Now, you could brush your teeth in any order you want. The point is to get them clean. But, we have these feelings that if we do it in this particular way, in the way that I like to do it, it feels different to us. And, that again, is more than just a habit. It’s doing something else for us that’s a bit more emotional.

Michael Norton: I think that’s true. I think if you think of the word ‘ritual’–so there’s overlap between rituals and habits as we’re discussing right now, but the word ‘ritual’ is used for many things that really don’t have much to do with habits at all. So for example, a wedding is a ritual, and hopefully we’re not making a habit out of having a wedding every week with a new person or something like that. Funerals are a ritual.

So, the rituals, to your point, are a very broad, very emotional category of activities humans engage with. Some of them are at a cultural level, some of them have deep religious meaning; but some of them are these little ones that people do in their everyday lives that aren’t at the scale of ones with long history, but they do still have a little bit of that emotion and meaning in them. We prefer to do it this way because I’ll feel ready to start the day if I brush my teeth this way versus that way.

Michael Norton: Of course–

Michael Norton: I have to say that when I started studying rituals, I was doing it from a kind of removed scientific standpoint, studying what other people were doing as scientists sometimes do. And, when my wife and I had our daughter, we immediately–you take a kid home from the hospital and suddenly you’re responsible for a human. And, one of the things they need to do is sleep. We didn’t think of it as a ritual. We didn’t use the word ritual, but in retrospect it was like, ‘This stuffed animal, then this song, then we’ll do this book, then we’ll have this little snack and then we’ll do that book. And then, this other song.’ We really turned to–just like with your granddaughter–ritualistic behavior to try to ease her to sleep. And, I think I believe that it helped her sleep. But, what I do know is it very much helped us cope with the stress, because it’s so chaotic–you know, when you have a baby, everything is brand new to you.

And that, I think, is telling–that we thought we were doing it for her, but a little bit, we were doing it to help us manage our own stress. And, you do see in the research that as things become more stressful, people are more likely to bring ritual to bear. So, it’s almost as though we have within us a sense of, as things get very, very stressful, let’s pull ritual, as one. We can use many tools; we can take medication. There’s all kinds of things we can use. But, one of the things that we use now and throughout history is ritual. We turn to them, we create them, we rely on them in these moments of stress.

Michael Norton: Yeah. And, we do see, for example, that I think that a thing that we’re not built to do as humans, unfortunately, is just to tell ourselves to feel a certain way and then we can feel that way. It would be great if we worked that way, but we don’t.

So, if I’m very, very anxious about something, I can’t magically just say, ‘Calm down.’ And, immediately I’m calm. I wish I could, but it’s just not how we’re built. And so, we do all kinds of things to try to get that sense of calm. And, again, medication, cognitive behavioral therapy. There’s many, many things that humans have come up with to help us. But, as you said, I think in these moments where everything is chaotic, one of the things that we say is let’s do something orderly and repeated and see if that can help us get a little bit more sense of having a grip on things.

Michael Norton: I’m trying to think if we came across any who have no sense of nerves before these big performances. I think that there’s been–for example, studies of baseball players. Wade Boggs is one of the extreme examples, but there are other extreme examples. Another Red Sox player, Nomar Garciaparra, was famous for his very elaborate rituals when he was hitting. This study showed–so they videotaped baseball players at that, and they found that they made an average of 83 movements. Now that’s a lot of movement. And that’s for each time they’re going to swing–you know, tapping the plate, touching the glove. You can think of all these movements that you would count. And, of course, they’re very regular. Right? So, if you do 83, you kind of do the same 83 each time, but there’s variance in it. So, some people do many fewer movements, some people do more movements.

So, I do think there’s a sense that some people use it more or have more elaborate rituals than others; but I don’t know of any really high-class performer–I’ve not come across one who doesn’t have something at least that they do, some little preference or way that they do things or how they put their shoes on or how they walk on stage that isn’t a little bit ritualistic in the sense that they could put their shoes on any way they want. They could walk on stage from the right instead of the left, but they just really want to do it the way that they’ve done it for years and years. It just makes them feel, ‘Okay, I’ve got this. I’m ready to go.’

Michael Norton: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s interesting is often these elite performers, they look perfectly calm, because they really are very, very good at what they’re doing. As you said, ‘Why would Wade Boggs be nervous about hitting? He’s one of the greatest hitters ever. Why would Mark Knopfler be nervous about it? He’s an amazing guitarist.’ And yet, sometimes we see that it’s these elite performers that rely on rituals even more than me, who has the pretty not very stressful life at all.

So, even though they’re way better at things than me, they actually are still bringing more ritual to bear often, I think, in order to cope with the massive uncertainty that they have to experience. If my class doesn’t go well today, not that huge of a deal. If Mark Knopfler falls on stage, it’s on YouTube all over the world for the rest of his life. So, I do think that we do, and of a funny way, we ratchet it up when the stress gets more and more intense.

Michael Norton: I think that can be true. I promise we’ll get off Boston sports, but Tom Brady was very well known for being incredibly calm under extreme pressure. In his seventh Super Bowl, he wasn’t as rattled as someone in their first Super Bowl. And so, again, you might think, ‘I bet he’s calm all the time. I bet he never uses ritual.’ But, there are funny stories, that: early in his career, they were on a losing streak. They took the game ball and Bill Belichick buried it and Brady went over and kicked it. He, like, kicked the dirt as if to say, ‘We’re leaving that football and that game behind us.’ That’s very, very ritualistic. And, he was using it there actually not to calm down before a game, but using a ritual to let something go and see if he could move forward.

So, even people who are calm and don’t necessarily use them to calm down can use them in many other domains of life, which I find very interesting.

Michael Norton: There is some data that–so, if you think about when you are nervous and you engage in a ritual, why it might calm you down. One reason that it can calm you down is it actually clears your mind of some of the anxious thoughts because there’s literally no room for them. Because if I am having to keep something in mind, ‘I need to do this, then I need to do that. The seventh step from now is this, so I better do this now,’ it’s just harder for me to keep saying, ‘You’re going to blow it, you’re going to blow it, you’re going to blow it.’ Because my voice is taken up by the ritual that I’m doing. And so, there is some evidence that part of why they’re helpful is that in fact they just occupy us, move us away from the negative emotions we might be having and just free us up a little bit to be in the moment rather than be worried about the moment.

Michael Norton: Absolutely. If you look in human history, it’s extraordinary that every culture and every religion has developed rituals that reflect the values of the culture or the values of the religion. Very, very different from each other, exactly what the rituals are. And, yet the impulse is there to develop these, to kind of say, ‘This is who we are.’

I do think that when we lose some of those rituals, we could just say, ‘Well, that’s fine. We don’t need them.’ But, it doesn’t seem to be what humans do. It seems like we come up with new ones. Which again, I think is kind of suggesting there’s something in us that really likes these.

One example would be something like Burning Man, where that’s not religious. It’s not a thousand years old. But, you do a pilgrimage to a desert with like-minded people in order to connect, and then you burn a figure at the end. It’s very, very ritualistic. It doesn’t have the element of faith that some other rituals do.

But, I also think at a more local level, I think people through time, of course, but have their own family rituals. And, those family rituals can do many of the same things. Right? They can give you meaning, they can give you a sense of place, they can give you a sense of history. When we make this apple pie that is my great-great-grandmother’s recipe, by making that pie, I’m actually connecting myself back generations in my family in a way that’s hard to do without having some of these rituals in place. So we do, at kind of at a more micro level, create very similar things with our family dynamics in order, I think, to have those same kinds of feeling of connectedness, of meaning, of belonging. And, we do see in the research, families with rituals do feel closer together to each other than families that lack rituals.

Michael Norton: It’s very interesting. That if you think of mourning:, what are we using rituals for when we mourn? We’re using it for lots of things, but one of the things we’re using them–for many people, they’re using them to connect to their faith and help them deal with their grief through faith. But, for many, many people, what they do is they offer, in a sense, an obligation. You could say an excuse to get together, or you could say an obligation to get together where everyone who knew this person has to come and gather on this day because our faith or culture says, ‘No, two days after.’ Or, ‘Five days after.’ Or, ‘One day before the funeral we do this.’ Different cultures have different ways of dealing with grief, but you have to do it.

And, I think if you think of grief as a lot of it is internal, you’re just coping with your own grief. But, a lot of it is social. We need social support to get through grief. And, funerals are in a sense, they make everyone who we love gather around us at least for one day. And, I think that’s very, very powerful.

And, to your point, when we lose those, we don’t just say, ‘Well, no more rituals, no more religious rituals. So, let’s not have anything.’ People come up with a different kind of non-religious service, a memorial service to serve the same function. So, even though the traditional ritual might not be in place, it’s as though we’re aware as humans: You know what? These are very, very important to do these things when someone passes away. Let’s develop our own to make sure that we have some of these features in place.

Michael Norton: So fascinating. We think of death and memorials–literally memorial service is memory–meaning the person is gone and we remember them. And people make wonderful speeches about how meaningful this person was in their life and how much they loved them. And, Mike Brick, when he was diagnosed with cancer, they started planning something like that, and then suddenly they said, ‘Why would we do this after you’re gone?’ Why would everyone stand up and say how much they loved you when you’re not there anymore? And, once you hear that, you say, ‘My goodness, that’s so obvious, of course, that we should have’–I don’t know–they’re not memorial, they’re pre-memorial or whatever we might call them.

And that’s exactly what they did. Instead of doing it after they created this ceremony before where they could really do all the things that they loved, including play music. And, I think it’s such a wonderful example of rethinking what we are trying to do when we are going to be faced with grief. Absolutely there is nothing wrong with waiting until the person is gone and then having a funeral or another service, of course; it could be incredibly meaningful for people. But we also have other opportunities, and I think that Mike Brick and his wife said, ‘We could still do that if we want to, but why don’t we also do something while you are still here to honor you before you go?’

Michael Norton: He was actually Catholic, so they did have a Catholic mass in the kind of traditional way. So, interestingly to your earlier point, they did a little bit of both. They relied on religious rituals and expressed their faith, and they also developed their own novel ritual to get some of these other elements as well.

Michael Norton: One of the things that this research on rituals has really made me rethink is in fact the timing of them. When do we do them and when do we not do them? Even something like a wedding anniversary. We got married on this date in June, whatever it might be, and then every year on that date, we do something. But, why only do it once a year? You know what I mean? We’re not bound to only celebrate our marriage once a year. We can do it whenever we want.

Or, I think of retirement ceremonies. People stand up and say, ‘This woman was the greatest boss I ever had. She completely changed my life,’ on the last day that this woman is ever going to work for the company. What a funny thing to do. Why not say it a year before or five years before, how much people mean to us?

So, you can see why these things are in place with the timing that they have. But I do think we have lots of opportunities to insert other practices, to do things before people are going to leave or before things happen, to honor them and express gratitude and enjoy them and enjoy being with each other.

Michael Norton: It’s a free day.

Michael Norton: I love that. I love that.

Michael Norton: It’s terrific.

Michael Norton: We’ve, for sure, had and have rituals. Our daughter is now eight, but we have and had rituals at her bedtime, for sure. They get less and less as kids get older and learn how to sleep on their own. Again, showing how we calibrate rituals to the size of the need. But, we had things–like, one of the things that she used to do was I would be carrying her up to her bedroom and she would say ‘Good night’ to the stairs. That became a thing. And, I, as the stairs would have to say, ‘Good night.’ Now, where did that come from? I have absolutely no idea what started that. And yet, it became something that we’d got to do every night. And, if we forgot to do it: ‘Let’s go back down the stairs, say good night to the stairs.’ Say ‘Good night’ to the stairs, and then go back.

So, in these very little ways, I think, as I started to look–almost literally look down at myself, like, ‘What am I doing right now?’ you start to see: ‘You know what? I do have’–not everything I do is a ritual, obviously, but I do have some things that I really do pretty regularly that matter a lot. They have meaning in them and emotion in them; and they’re doing something for me. I could skip them if I want. All I need to do is take her up the stairs. I don’t need to say ‘Good night’ to the stairs. But something about those actions makes them a bit different, makes them a little more emotional, I think.

Michael Norton: I teach a class with undergraduates, of actually freshmen in college, about rituals. It’s kind of a discussion class. And, one of the things that I ask them to do is call up their parents–or, I guess FaceTime, I don’t know. But anyway, contact their parents and ask them–these kids are 18–and ask their parents, ‘Hey, do you remember what you did when I was a baby or a toddler to get me to sleep?’ And they say, their parents immediately start crying. Immediately. They remember every single thing. You know what I mean? Every single–every parent remembers all the things.

And, just to your point, it’s incredibly wonderful memories of your child being that little.

And, you know: you can look at pictures and you can think of them, but some of these little ritualistic practices, they really do bring it back in a very different way. You can remember how heavy your kid was when you were carrying them from–it really, really can come back to you when you think back to these rituals that you randomly created about saying goodnight to the stairs. That’s for me now a lifetime of amazing memory that I created, even though I recognize it’s completely crazy to do something like that. It’s not crazy if I get this much out of it.

Michael Norton: And you do also see, for example, that parents typically don’t use the same nickname for each of their kids. That’s kind of a little offensive. Why is it offensive? I don’t know. But, it feels offensive. And we also–when couples have little nicknames for each other and the relationship–you know, Schmoober Bear, or whatever funny things we say–if somebody were to reuse that in their next relationship, just–you’re just not allowed to do that. Because–

Michael Norton: Exactly. I mean, truly a violation. Your ex is allowed to date other people and even marry them, but they are not allowed to use your pet nickname with that person.

Michael Norton: That is off limits.

And I think, exactly to your point, these small words carry so much meaning in them that we remember them forever and get upset if things change.