The Ritual Effect

Overall, this was a solid read! A friend in book club pointed out that it’s a nice counterpoint to other behavioral takes like Tiny Habits. Even if this is pop-psy, the conclusions didn’t feel pushy or grandiose. Pleasantly digestible. If you want some light reading that’ll make you more aware of rituals in a both practical and human way, I’d recommend it.

Since I don’t have anywhere to put it - the “notes” section in the back with all the references slaps. Everything is conveniently hyperlinked.

I don’t think my commentary will be of much use without the original book. The book is more of a “vibe” of intuitive understanding, dissimilar from a collection of journals that need to be digested. Ignore my snark - this is a good read.

Ch 1 - What Are Rituals

Rituals are not simply a construct of spirituality, religion, or tradition.
Community driven, traditional rituals are loosely defined as legacy rituals.
Rituals can be unique to an individual, and could be measured through the lens of behavioral economics. (Are you getting something out of it? Emotional? Communal/social? Practical?)
Responses to ritual vary. (Some folks dislike formalities or components depending on their relationship to the ritual.)
Habits are not rituals. Habits are what we do, rituals are how we do it. (Or rather, rituals are not just a string of behaviors, but are “the emotion and meaning we bring to the behaviors.” p22)
Habits can be manipulated by controlling our “choice environments,” to a degree.
In their frame, the emotions are intrinsic to a ritual.

Once a particular set of movements becomes linked to a particular emotion, that set of actions, that ritual, is then available to summon the relevant emotion…

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 25). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

They coin a term with Jordi Quoidbach, “emodiversity,” indicating the variety of emotions we experience. This links up to a degree with Lisa Barrett’s ideas on constructed emotion, but with less of a cultural requirement.
They argue that the variety of emotions someone experiences in a day generally predicts our wellbeing. A bit untestable, but it works in their story. Without seeing the original research, I’d venture a guess that individuals that don’t feel a wider diversity of emotion are doing less during their day. Feeling a wider variety would be correlated with better activities. However, someone grieving or going through a tough time feels a wide range of emotions as well - I wouldn’t say they’re doing better. Subjective counterarguments aside, variety is nice, but the option for variety is even better.
Rituals may be able to give emotional meaning to otherwise bland or unattached habits.
Ah - the selling point of the book. DIY ritual your way to joy and meaning. Personal note, if you’re looking for evidence of rituals, without a strict definition, you’ll find them. (This isn’t an academic book on rituals and behavior so… I need to chill.)
Tying your ritual into identity will make it more meaningful and emotional. Apparently social scientists call it identity work. I’ll just grab a definition here…

Fundamental to understanding collective identity, particularly from a constructionist standpoint, are the processes through which it is created, expressed, sustained, and modified. These processes have been conceptualized as variants of ‘identity work,’ which encompasses the range of activities people engage in, both individually and collectively, to signify and express who they are and what they stand for in relation or contrast to some set of others (Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock 1996, Snow and Anderson 1987, Snow and McAdam 2000).

D.A. Snow, Collective Identity and Expressive Forms, Editor(s): Neil J. Smelser, Paul B. Baltes, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Pergamon, 2001, Pages 2212-2219, ISBN 9780080430768, https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/04094-8. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767040948)

Major Points:

Within their frame - a core component of a ritual is the emotional meaning.
Rituals can reinforce identity.

Ch 2 - You Get Out of It What You Put into It

Here, they introduce the idea of “the endowment effect.” Sounds a bit like enchanting something (or a ritual) with effort to give it inherent meaning.
Huh, apparently the concept of focus groups was an idea developed from an understudy of Freud. I always assumed its roots were behaviorist, but apparently it’s got a psychoanalytic history.
Wait hang on they used to have cake mix without having to add eggs? Give me that back - that sounds great!
They say that when they added the requirement to add an egg to the mix, sales went up because of the perceived effort and involvement. I’m not completely sold - maybe people thought it’d taste better, or there could be other contributing factors. Dunno - I just finished reading a debunking of When Prophecy Fails, so I’m skeptical of every explanation right now, even if it’s reasonable.
They cite a study (the IKEA effect) where people would pay more for boxes they’d assemble themselves. I think there’s a fair number of confounding factors that could change perceived value, not just the effort that goes into it.

Major Points: The effort you put into a ritual will give it inherent value. Some of the anecdotes have a (pleasantly) romantic view on the meaning of rituals that arose out of necessity or happenstance, without the need to have wider cultural meaning.

Ch 3 - The Ritual Effect

Starting off with wedgies. My brand of humor!
SRO conditioning ala Skinner. See Operant conditioning and ‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon - or just go to Superstitious Behavior in the Pigeon if you’d rather watch a chill video instead of reading a paper.
“Rituals” are more likely to emerge when outcomes are randomized (or less predictable.)

Social scientists Rohan Kapitány and Mark Nielsen dubbed this tendency the ritual stance: the more pointless and unnecessary a behavior seems, the more likely we are to search for an explanation. When that search fails to provide a simple explanation, we are prone to infer a more complex one—that those random actions must have some deeper meaning. The actions have what researchers call causal opacity, and precisely because we are unable to glean their purpose or predict their outcome, we encode them as special.

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 46). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

(In simple terms - if a behavior doesn’t make immediate sense, the concept asserts that we attribute the behavior to having some sort of intention that’s likely ritualistic in nature.)

Rituals may serve social a social function for preparedness or bonding. (I’m wondering if they’ll chat about allostasis as well in later chapters. As much as I don’t like to mention NLP, adjusting allostasis through ritual hints at anchoring, which is a hell of a lot catchier than Hebbian theory. )

Ch 4 - How to Perform

Most performers (ha) perform rituals to prepare for their performance.
Suppressing thoughts and arousal sucks. Screaming “calm down” is rarely effective. (However, grounding exercises can be helpful in some instances.)
- Tangentially, I could see a grounding exercise in the case of an abreaction being a ritual done within hypnosis.
The notes on reframing butterflies and anxiety as excitement link up with Lisa Barret’s ideas on constructed emotion.
Rituals may help us prepare for failure as well. EG - it sucks less to lose a chess match after you’ve done something to brace yourself.

Jim Bouton commented on how the feeling of ownership that athletic expertise affords can easily tip into the opposite—obsession, or a feeling of being owned by the very game we struggled to master. “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 62). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

… x.x My soul.

Missing out on a ritual, can, of course, cause anxiety. If you’re planning on applying this, make sure your rituals are attainable and practical.

Ch 5 - How to Savor

Huh - I always wondered if mixology was more about the presentation than minute differences in taste and experience, but the ideas here about how rituals apply to drink presentation do add up. (Rituals can improve the perceived value or quality of a drink.)
You can savor meals or snacks because of their emotional associations. (However, if you’re like me, most of your meals are unremarkable. I disagree with the hate on Soylent. 😅 There’s very little meaning to make here. )
Some people are really into wine and its history. I don’t have a lot of attachment to this. (Hell, if I had a drinking ritual, it’d be dropping a sour gummy worm into a cheap fizzy wine cooler and trying to drink the foam before it explodes with some friends. That was uh… definitely a while ago. More about doing dumb shit with friends than anything good about it.)
Demonstrating how to savor (or having that demonstrated to you) can improve enjoyment. “Deep immersion” in the experience.

An interesting correlation with time compression/dilation…

“It took us six hours to go through the entire meal—from 8 PM to 2 AM—but we were in such a state of elation that it was hard to tell if it had been two minutes or two days since we first sat down.”

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 75). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

I feel like a fucking robot writing these notes with how sterile they are. (And not in a cool mech-encasement dark or playful fantasy sorta way.) It’s like this book was designed to make me feel nostalgic for the IRL friend groups I used to have.

These ideas strike a chord with a lot of what we do with hypnosis…

Behavioral scientists have identified four of the most successful strategies for achieving this broader definition of savoring: try to be present for our positive moments and appreciate them; communicate and celebrate savoring with others; express our savoring through nonverbal behaviors such as smiling; and, finally, richly remember details about past positive experiences while also anticipating the details of those still to come—the process I described in my response to Adrià’s magical strawberry. Researchers have dubbed this positive mental time travel, or positive MTT.

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 80). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Ch 6 - How to Stay on Track

Nothing particularly interesting here minus the mention of sokoshinbutsu. Mostly pop-psy used to frame things as rituals and highlight their effectiveness, usually glossing over other possible motivations.
Talks about the marshmallow experiment, improving their endurance through a simon-says like ritual, and how religious communities use meaning to motivate people to do things like fasting.

Ch 7 - How to Become

Yikes. Some of these rites of passage are brutal and exploitative. (Yet, they often highlight “bravery and independence. p99”)
Rituals and identity work often go hand in hand. Specifically, rites of passage mark ownership of something or a concept, or are an expression of identity or values.
Identity rituals can also cue a change in behavior and “self.” EG - eating a “last meal” before a gastric band operation.

… The new best friend meme just came to mind. Just saying.

Some interesting notes in here on church-approved rituals of gender transition. Most of my friends are secular, so I was completely unaware of these. (While I’m on the topic - they list other reasonably intuitive activities as identity-affirming. It’s nice to see this stuff.)

The concept of “the marge” from Arnold van Gennep is interesting. It’s the identity space in between two identities. Mentioned on p106.

Ch 8 - How to Stay in Sync

Man. This book is unexpectedly hitting me in the feels.

Anyway.

Put dryly - the meaning of a ritual for a couple or romantic relationship is often related to its historical context. (Or ya know, making a point of doing something pointless because it feels good and reinforces a relationship.) They’re personal gestures, and are often generated spontaneously.
Statistically, people in relationships often report having some sort of ritual. In the pop-psy zone, rituals are an indicator of being 5-10% more satisfied in a relationship, and are often correlated with gratitude for the relationship. (Feeling a loss when you can’t complete a ritual might be an indicator of its importance.)
Uh - if you want a good relationship, don’t be petty I guess.

Some research from Maya Rossignac-Milon use the following questions to judge the jingle-jangle of a relationship’s “shared reality.”

We frequently think of things at the exact same time.

Events feel more real when we experience them together.

We often anticipate what the other is about to say.

We often feel like we have created our own reality.

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 118). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Relationship rituals…

Reinforce commitment (EG, weddings, or through simple care and attention)
Often involve an element of exclusivity. (EG, if your ritual is to watch Summoning Salt with your partner in bed when a new episode comes out, it’d be extra taboo to do this with a play partner first instead.) There is value in the uniqueness of the ritual.
Are separate from routines. “Getting shit done” is separate from “having a particular way to do something together.” The symbolic meaning is what’s important.
Can be experienced differently between partners. EG - one may find meaning in the ritual, the other may not.

Rituals can also be used to end or signal a change in relationship. (Or, just do something meaningful to mark the change.)

Ch 9 - How to Survive the Holidays

Rituals during the holidays uh… can be an effective way to keep tensions down. Getting real here. I’d rather fold napkins than deal with being ranted at, any day.
They can reinforce a family identity. EG - if a family is known for their good cooking, a member may feel pressured to be able to cook well to fit in. I’d be hosed, but other folks might follow a familiar recipe.
Usually, “kinkeepers” in a family often keep the family identity together emotionally as a group. (They do the labor of designing and prescribing behaviors that’ll help people get along.) The position of “kinkeeper” often rotates, even if there are multiple.
These correlations (specifically, p144 about substance abuse) really feel like just correlations and not exactly causal. I like the kind sentiment, though.
They do highlight that starting a ritual that’s easy can help. This links up with some of the thoughts in Tiny Habits. Easy doesn’t have to lack novelty.

Ch 10 - How to Mourn

The dude that went to his own funeral sounds pretty metal.
Also didn’t know about hake tomos - someone to share a grave with.
Author - thank you for highlighting that there’s no evidence of five discrete stages of grief.
Cold-water rituals remind me of this NSFW post from Neuromancer28. (Using pain for emotional self-regulation. A bit spicy.)
Yeaaaaah… ambiguous losses suck.
I am very sad the WeCroak app is not about amphibian TF.

Ch 11 - How to Find Meaning at Work

Emile Durkheim used the psychology label-maker to coin the term collective effervescence. Or - doing a series of actions together (like a teambuilding ritual,) then going out to do something, gives a feeling of cohesion and conviction.
Kids that did a sequence of actions with a necklace (holding it, touching the string to their forehead, adding an element to the string, then clapping their hands) were more attached to it than those that didn’t. I guess if you want to feel more fond of something, you can do something similar.
Man - this isn’t something talked about in the book - but I feel that “mandatory fun” can backfire. Maybe I’m just awkward or resistant. Probably both.

A few people we interviewed couldn’t think of any ritual, such as this curmudgeon: “I don’t participate in any such activity. I do my work, then go home.”

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 177). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Spiritually, I am this curmudgeon.

Re: trust falls…

In their frame, doing things in unison with focused attention builds trust. Physical movement helps. Same with camaraderie in intense situations.
They’ve got a few tips for turning off work when the workday is done, and the obligatory rant about open plan spaces.

Ch 12 - How to Divide

Oh man, I know these are book notes but if there’s any evidence of “violating a ritual” causing division, it’s arguments over the “right way” to do hypnosis. Safety vigilance is good but uh, the recreational hypnosis community has played calvinball with what concepts are safe and unsafe. (EG, safety suggestions were mandatory 5-10 years ago, and now they’re taboo as everyone should be focusing on agency. I think both concepts are flawed but the heat around the argument makes it difficult to discuss the nuance.)
Completing a ritual in the same way (or slightly differently) may be enough to get someone to trust (or mistrust) another outside of awareness.
More effortful rituals have more emotional weight. (There might be some selection bias here, but people that were willing to undergo painful rituals for their faith reported feeling more connected to it than those who just sang and engaged in prayer.)

Holy F. This section is sharp.

One person, typically a male concerned with appearing smarter than everyone else, refuses to participate. (This person also refuses to raise a hand when I ask an audience a question like “How many people think A?” or “How many think B?” But when I ask, “How many people refuse to raise their hand?,” this person’s hand shoots up triumphantly.) Also, like clockwork, the people in the audience reserve a special kind of derision for these opt-outers. Because, with ritual, there are no bystanders. You’re either doing it right and you’re one of us—or you’re wrong.

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 195). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Apparently the Labeltron 9000 calls this the “black sheep” effect. Breaking ritual breaks trust. Probably obvious - but if you fuck up a spiritual ritual, you’ll likely anger people. (Uh - just make a new ritual if you need one.) Hell, I’ll borrow the Labeltron for a second - this may have more to do with violating an identity than a ritual - but I guess that’s the point.

If you need to create coherence or fix damage between different groups - use another common identity. Intuitively, you’ll have better luck.

Ch 13 - How to Heal

Welp - here’s the most useful advice in the book. It also nails my pet-peeve on the worst apologies.

But apologies are far more complicated to pull off than we often think. Simply saying “I’m sorry” doesn’t get the job done. On the contrary, the most effective apologies take on the order and patterns of ritual. One taxonomy of apology used in the resolution of disputes between neighbors has no fewer than ten required elements: the statement of apology (this is where most of us stop); naming the offense; taking responsibility; attempting to explain the offense; conveying emotions; addressing emotions and/or damage of the other; admitting fault; promising forbearance; offering reparation; requesting acceptance—formally asking for the other party to accept the apology. 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.

Norton, Dr Michael. The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (p. 203). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

This is probably overkill for smaller offenses but hey. I call the “I’m sorry you were hurt” strategy a “fuck you anyway” apology.

Gestures, like a handshake, can help “seal the deal” of amity.
Man - I know this book is about rituals and cohesion, but it feels like a common thread is just making reasonable concessions for each-other.
Feeling understood is… well, a core component. It’s almost more important than how much you like the other person.