Harvard Business School Prof Says Rituals Are Important

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."

New book: The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People

It is by Paul Seabright. Click here to go to the Amazon link.

"A novel economic interpretation of how religions have become so powerful in the modern world

Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another—spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power.

This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call."