See ‘The Ritual Effect’ Review: Well Worth Doing Again: Some rituals are inherited, others improvised. It’s possible to infuse even quotidian acts with a sense of consequence by Meghan Cox Gurdon.
She is a WSJ contributor and author of The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction.
She reviews the book The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton. Excerpts:
"In “The Ritual Effect,” Michael Norton lauds the capacity of ritual to
infuse quotidian acts with a sense of consequence. Ritual, he writes,
can transform “activities as ordinary as morning hygiene, household
chores, or daily exercise from automated to animated
experiences—conjuring up delight or wonder or peace.”
Mr. Norton is a professor at Harvard Business School and a student of
behavioral economics, and what he calls a ritual could as easily be
described as a custom, a practice, a routine or a bit of magical
thinking. What a ritual is not, he emphasizes, is a habit. In his view, a
habit pertains to the “what” we do, whereas a ritual speaks to the
“how.” It is a distinction without much difference. Say a husband makes a
frothy latte for his wife each morning: Some days he might do it by
rote (making it a habit) while on others he might take extra care to
perform the act with love (making it a ritual)."
"Human beings seem given to ritualized behavior. Some rituals come to us
as legacies, as with the white dress of a bride; some arise from
practical impulse, as with spring cleaning to rid a house of winter
grit; some are improvisational, as with a family movie night that starts
as an occasional treat and becomes a weekly fixture on the calendar."
"actionable protocols, which is to say, recommendations for ways we readers may add the emollient of ritual to our own lives."
"“No single ritual can elevate us into relationship nirvana,” Mr. Norton
warns but adds that, in surveys, couples who enjoy rituals report being
5%-10% “more satisfied with their relationships.”"
"We read of “hedonic adaptation,” which is what happens when a person’s
happiness stabilizes after an ecstatic experience; of the “collective
effervescence” felt by people performing synchronized actions; of the
Proust-like “positive mental time travel” that one performs when
savoring an enjoyable experience while recalling other such instances."
"“The Ritual Effect” is also full of stories from the lab, where Mr.
Norton and his colleagues test their ideas on invited audiences. It
turns out that ritualized behavior has a dark side. Flouted, it may
foment bitterness. As with social norms—those generally agreed-upon
practices and attitudes that allow disparate persons to rub along in
society without continual conflict—shared rituals require practitioners
roughly to agree about what is happening and what is expected of them.
Let one in the group refuse to go along, and we get what’s called “the
black sheep effect,” which is the instinct to punish an uncooperative
insider more harshly than one would an outsider. In the clinical
setting, Mr. Norton says that there’s always one smarty-pants who
refuses to join a communal activity. “The people in the audience reserve
a special kind of derision for these opt-outers,” he writes. “Because,
with ritual, there are no bystanders. You’re either doing it right and
you’re one of us—or you’re wrong.”"
"When an old ritual no longer fits, whether at home or at work, Mr.
Norton suggests we are wise to find new ones: “In our (re) marriages, in
our (blended) families, in our mergers and acquisitions, in nations
yearning to find peace, rituals of reconciliation help to turn the page
and start a new chapter.”"
Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia about "collective effervescence."
"Collective effervescence (CE) is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim.
According to Durkheim, a community or society may at times come
together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate
in the same action. Such an event then causes collective effervescence
which excites individuals and serves to unify the group.
Collective effervescence is the basis for Émile Durkheim's theory of religion as laid out in his 1912 volume Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim argues that the universal religious dichotomy of profane and sacred
results from the lives of these tribe members: most of their life is
spent performing menial tasks such as hunting and gathering. These tasks
are profane. The rare occasions on which the entire tribe gathers
together become sacred, and the high energy level associated with these
events gets directed onto physical objects or people which also become
sacred."