The adjective “ritual”, from Latin via French, means related to religious rites. (A rite, according to the OED, is “a prescribed act or observance in a religious or other solemn ceremony”.) As soon as it appeared, however, the word “ritual” could be used in a derogatory fashion to denote things empty of authentic spiritual content. In his Ecclesiastical History (1570), for example, the martyrologist John Foxe complained about two epistles erroneously (so he argued) attributed to the third-century pope Zephyrinus: they contained “no manner of doctrine” but only “certain ritual decrees to no purpose”. Today one may disparagingly speak of some writer’s “ritual genuflection” to fashionable norms, to accuse them of a kind of moral and intellectual cosplay.
Perhaps, then, we are long overdue a defence of the value of ritual, in all its style-over-substance glory? That is what the Harvard business professor Michael Norton aims to provide in his book, an amiable and diverting-enough essay in the genre of airport-friendly smart thinking. Though he notes the power of longstanding social rituals such as the wedding or the funeral, Norton’s interest is mostly in the other kind: “idiosyncratic behaviours that can emerge spontaneously”. From Rafael Nadal’s interminable routine of ball-bouncing and shirt-pulling before every serve, to a romantic couple giving each other ladybird-themed presents, the message is that rituals can not only optimise athletic performance but enrich our lives in general, cementing relationships, encouraging attention to the moment, and – perhaps most importantly for the target audience – tricking one’s employees into being more happily productive.
Picking nuggets from psychology and social science research to build this case, Norton also describes his own research into the topic, which consists of a mixture of large-scale surveys (about what kind of personal rituals people perform as they groom, exercise or retire to sleep) and lab tests, in which people are taught rituals and then asked to collaborate on tasks. It turns out that the imposition of arbitrary rituals alone (clapping, chanting, whatever) helps a group of strangers become a team.
In this story it is precisely the emptiness of rituals that makes them valuable as “emotional catalysts”, when they are not actually exercises in magical thinking, such as rain ceremonies. (Other animals may be prone to magical thinking, too: pigeons have been observed to repeat a nonsensical action that once was rewarded with food in the hope it will work again.) But when is a ritual not a ritual? Norton discusses family “rituals” such as choices about specific food or Johnny Mathis records at Christmas, but it seems more natural to speak of these as invented traditions. (That preserves the author’s point that we can come to value these traditions very deeply through what he calls “the Ikea effect”: if you build it, you love it more.)
I was tickled to learn that the concert pianist Sviatoslav Richter always carried a pink plastic lobster backstage with him before a performance, but was this really a ritual or just a superstition? Meanwhile, if I do something habitually but without any particular drama – for example, drinking two cups of coffee before writing a book review – that is not a ritual either. As Norton notes, the “essence” of a ritual is how it is performed, not what is done. Perhaps one synthesis of such arguments might be that the idea of “ritual” itself is a spectrum, at one end of which lies mere habit, at the other end ceremony.
Alas, rituals have a dark side, too, and not just when they are explicitly satanic. The most troubling finding in this book is the obverse of the ritual-as-social-glue: it turns out that groups brought together with newfangled rituals in a research setting automatically view others taught different rituals as an out-group, less worthy of respect. In this light, Earth’s long history of religious wars looks less like a series of battles over actual doctrine than just another strand of us against them. Even so, the book’s overall point perhaps offers a reason for cautious optimism: in a disenchanted world, attention to tiny rituals can clear a little space for everyday magic.
• The Ritual Effect: The Transformative Power of Our Everyday Actions by Michael Norton is published by Penguin Life (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
