Edited by Jen McFarland Flint; Illustrations by Jason Holley

Whenever he’s presenting to a large audience, Professor Michael Norton likes to pose this question to the crowd: After you get up in the morning, do you brush your teeth first and then shower, or vice versa? Results are usually split about 50-50, “which, as a social scientist, is of interest,” Norton says.

But more interesting is when he asks people to flip the order of their routine: In other words, if you usually lead with your teeth, try showering first tomorrow. About half the crowd can deal with that idea, Norton says, and the other half resists. “They say, ‘I don’t like that. It wouldn’t feel right. I wouldn’t be able to start my day.’ ” That resistance helps illustrate the distinction between a habit and a ritual: When emotions or significance are assigned to a given behavior, we’re talking about more than just the habitual act of cleaning your teeth, Norton says. Habits help us get things done, but rituals animate us and enhance our lives.

These ideas form the basis of Norton’s new book, The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, which he recently discussed with journalist Charles Duhigg (MBA 2003). The author of the New York Times–bestseller The Power of Habit, Duhigg also recently published Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. In their conversation, which is excerpted below, Norton and Duhigg discuss the origins of rituals and the ways in which they can add depth and meaning to life.

Charles Duhigg: I think people are primed to think about habits in their lives all the time. I have a good habit, a bad habit. I want to build a habit of running or eating more healthily. You don’t hear a lot of people saying, “I want to build a ritual into my life.”

Michael Norton: Well, cult leaders.

Duhigg: And religious leaders—that’s true. But why should we care about rituals?

Norton: We have done a lot of work over the years to help people have better habits around saving money. And certainly, we should all eat healthier and exercise more and have perfect habits. But at a certain point, if you lived a life of perfect habits, you’d almost be like an automaton. It would be a cold, dry life. Would you look back at a life of perfect habits and say it was a life well spent?

Some of the big cultural rituals are often a prompt for us to be different, which I think is useful in life—to get some shocks to who you are and what you’re up to. And then we have these little private rituals, which is what I got very interested in—these little things that people do on their own that become a source of meaning and a source of joy. Good habits help keep us on track and in good health, but rituals animate us. They are the emotional catalysts that enhance an ordinary day or make special occasions memorable.

When we survey romantic couples, we find a lot of them have little rituals. One couple kisses three times before they go to bed. Another couple might kiss two times. It’s not the number that matters; it’s the fact that they’ve been doing it. You can call it a habit, but you’re not getting something done, exactly. It’s a reaffirmation of a bond: We’ve done this, we’re doing it now, we’re going to keep doing this. Rituals give us this depth of emotion sometimes out of the silliest little behaviors, which is why I like them so much.

Duhigg: How do people build rituals into their daily lives?

Norton: Many of us are doing these things already, in various contexts. One goal is just to notice the rituals you already have and value them a little bit more. You can say, “This is our ritual. This is what we do. We kiss three times. This is so special.”

When we ask people to go through their day, they’re often already doing things that are ritualistic, like leaving work at the end of the day. People do fascinating things to break the barrier and separate work life from home life. Research shows that engaging in some kind of practice between work and home does help. One person talked about, at the end of every day, drinking a beer while taking a shower, and imagining the troubles washing off and washing down the drain. On the one hand…what? On the other hand, you can feel it working for this person.

Duhigg: That does seem like a good idea; I might drink a beer in the shower today. It’s interesting: My book, Supercommunicators, is about the science of conversation and connection, and as you’re describing this, I’m realizing that we have a lot of these mini rituals in conversation, and they become very specific to individuals. There are things I would say to my wife or my kids that I would not say to you, but by the same token, things I would say to you that I might not say to another friend because I haven’t built that ritual with them. So when we’re building rituals that involve other people, there must be some kind of back and forth, some kind of consent to build a ritual?

Charles Duhigg; courtesy photo

“The negotiation itself is a ritual that allows us to discuss things that might be hard to discuss otherwise.”

Professor Michael Norton; photo by Steph Stevens

“Who stands on the right? Who stands on the left? We have all of these very carefully scripted rituals around the fact that, eventually, we have to get down to business and figure something out.”

 

Charles Duhigg; courtesy photo

“The negotiation itself is a ritual that allows us to discuss things that might be hard to discuss otherwise.”

Professor Michael Norton; photo by Steph Stevens

“Who stands on the right? Who stands on the left? We have all of these very carefully scripted rituals around the fact that, eventually, we have to get down to business and figure something out.”

Norton: They very often are co-created between people. Greetings are one of the simplest kinds. Or handshakes; there are infinite permutations of handshakes possible in the world, and you use different ones for different relationships, just implicitly. Over time, we negotiate whether this is a hug relationship or a handshake relationship. And then we just keep doing it. Sometimes we feel these awkward moments where we haven’t decided. If I try to hug you, and you go for the handshake? Extremely awkward.

Duhigg: Do we know anything about signaling ritual to other people to build those rituals? It would be weird to announce, “I’d like to build a greeting ritual.”

Norton: The place where it happens a lot is in families, and the reason is the kids are captives. The parents can decide what we’re going to do this Thanksgiving, and we’re going to do it from now on. The kids have to go along with it. You have an interesting power dynamic, where it’s easier to create a new ritual.

In the workplace, rituals tend to be better received when they come from the bottom up and reflect the company’s values. When a manager shows up and says, “Everybody, we’re going to do this from now on,” I’m sure people have had the experience of really disliking that person.

Duhigg: So let me ask you about some specific rituals that you discuss in the book, and let’s start with some fun ones, like sports.

Norton: Sports are fascinating because throughout human history, whenever there are large gatherings, that’s where rituals happen. With sports we’re living out this human tendency to get in big groups where everybody does the same thing. It can make us feel whole in a way that is hard to get to otherwise. The downside of that, of course, is that when someone in our group doesn’t do the thing, we’re very mad at them. Even in stadiums, when people are doing the wave and a few people don’t stand up, they get stuff thrown at them. They’re violating the contract that we’re going to all do this, and it can be very threatening to me if you opt out, because this is us.

EXCERPT

How to Find Meaning at Work

Trust falls and other team rituals

When I’m asked to speak about rituals, I begin by coming to the front of the room or stage. I ask everyone to stand up. Without saying anything, I click to reveal this slide:

The same events unfold every time, without fail—whether I am speaking to an academic audience, to students, to an organization, really to any group. First, there is an awkward pause. Then someone claps, followed by other claps, then some scattered right-foot stomps ... and then they’re off and running. By the “clap three times” instruction, the room has fully synced up. Even when there are hundreds of people, somehow, magically, everyone starts clapping at precisely the same moments. Then, the people speed up. The claps get faster, the stomps get faster. I don’t tell the people to speed up, they just do—and somehow, they manage to all speed up at the exact same rate, so the entire group stays in lockstep, as if they’d been practicing for weeks.

By the time they’ve shouted “Let’s go” for the third time, they are really experiencing ... something. I’m no cult leader, but at that moment I get the feeling that if I ran out of the room, they would follow me. When they finish the exercise, I remain silent, and slowly people snap out of it. That intense collective feeling subsides and they start to look at one another as if to say, “What just happened?”

This is the power of group rituals: They can spark the phenomenon Émile Durkheim called collective effervescence. Even a series of random actions, performed together, can turn a gathering of strangers into a meaningful unit. If we did run out of the room together, we’d do it with a strong sense of joint purpose—we’d mean it, whatever that it happened to be.

To be clear: I created this particular ritual from scratch. Yet time and time again, I’ve seen this series of basic actions become a ritual that is capable of turning a crowd of strangers in a random conference hall on a Wednesday afternoon into an ecstatic we.

Excerpted from The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, copyright © 2024 by Michael Norton, PhD. Reprinted by permission from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

EXCERPT

How to Find Meaning at Work

Trust falls and other team rituals

When I’m asked to speak about rituals, I begin by coming to the front of the room or stage. I ask everyone to stand up. Without saying anything, I click to reveal this slide:

The same events unfold every time, without fail—whether I am speaking to an academic audience, to students, to an organization, really to any group. First, there is an awkward pause. Then someone claps, followed by other claps, then some scattered right-foot stomps ... and then they’re off and running. By the “clap three times” instruction, the room has fully synced up. Even when there are hundreds of people, somehow, magically, everyone starts clapping at precisely the same moments. Then, the people speed up. The claps get faster, the stomps get faster. I don’t tell the people to speed up, they just do—and somehow, they manage to all speed up at the exact same rate, so the entire group stays in lockstep, as if they’d been practicing for weeks.

By the time they’ve shouted “Let’s go” for the third time, they are really experiencing ... something. I’m no cult leader, but at that moment I get the feeling that if I ran out of the room, they would follow me. When they finish the exercise, I remain silent, and slowly people snap out of it. That intense collective feeling subsides and they start to look at one another as if to say, “What just happened?”

This is the power of group rituals: They can spark the phenomenon Émile Durkheim called collective effervescence. Even a series of random actions, performed together, can turn a gathering of strangers into a meaningful unit. If we did run out of the room together, we’d do it with a strong sense of joint purpose—we’d mean it, whatever that it happened to be.

To be clear: I created this particular ritual from scratch. Yet time and time again, I’ve seen this series of basic actions become a ritual that is capable of turning a crowd of strangers in a random conference hall on a Wednesday afternoon into an ecstatic we.

Excerpted from The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, copyright © 2024 by Michael Norton, PhD. Reprinted by permission from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Duhigg: You also mentioned business negotiations as a setting for rituals, and I was a little surprised to see that, until you explained it, at which point it made perfect sense. You write that negotiations involve lots of rituals that we might not even be aware of.

Norton: They’re among the most ritualistic workplace events because we have some very defined procedures about how we go about it, with very defined roles. They’re scaffolded by ritual, in a sense. How do you set up a situation where people disagree and are mad, but get them to not punch each other? The answer is negotiation. In a negotiation, we sit on opposite sides of the table. We shake hands, and we make up. We set up a system to try to ensure that the actual content can be exchanged and keep people not exactly in line, but on task maybe.

Duhigg: The negotiation itself is a ritual that allows us to discuss things that might be hard to discuss otherwise.

Norton: It’s so ritualistic. The disagreements about who enters the room first and who sits down first—in political negotiations, those can take months of planning. Will they shake hands publicly or privately? Who stands first? Who stands on the right? Who stands on the left? We have all of these very carefully scripted rituals around the fact that, eventually, we have to get down to business and figure something out.

Duhigg: What’s your favorite study about this? What’s the one that you just love to describe to people?

Norton: The idea that I love the most because it’s so simple but so helpful is about rediscovery. This is research led by Ting Zhang, who is an assistant professor here. Humans like to do this thing where we put stuff in a time capsule and bury it, then dig it up again later, which is a strange thing to do, if you think about it. Ting’s idea with this research was that we’re underutilizing the fact that, by putting things away, we can rediscover them. The beautiful thing about the research is the things that you become most delighted with are not the memorable items but the mundane things that you forget about. You can get memories back of who you were with and what was happening at the time.

The beauty of it is that it’s free. You literally can write something down, put it away for six months, come back to it, and read it—which is what we did in some of our studies—and you’re delighted by the most mundane day. One guy thanked us, saying something like, “I never would’ve remembered this day with my daughter.”

Duhigg: Right, it wasn’t a memorable day. I find the same thing happens now that we have these screens that pop up with random photos from our photo libraries. It’s not the photos of the things that I remember that delight me. I hardly even look at those. It’s the photo of something that I’d totally forgot even occurred.

Norton: They’re so rich when we come back to them.

Duhigg: Exactly, and what about you? What rituals have you encouraged in your life or your family’s life that have given you meaning?

Norton: If anybody is a new parent, this especially resonates. So often in life, whatever comes at us, we use a ritual as one of the tools to cope with it. When you bring a new baby home, it’s the most terrifying thing, I think, that can happen to a human, that you are in charge of this person. And we turn to ritual very, very quickly. Within a few days, new parents have a sleep ritual with their baby, which might be: Sing this song, turn the lights to this level, read this book, then get this stuffed animal, and use the lucky swaddle. We don’t think of them as rituals when we’re doing this, but if you can’t find the right stuffed animal, you’re panicked that everything’s going to fall apart.

Duhigg: We were cleaning my son’s room recently, and we were deciding which stuffed animals to donate, and he chose one that was from when he was a baby, and I was like, “No, you can’t give that one away.” Clearly, this stuffed animal meant a lot more to me and his mom than it did to him.

Norton: It is unclear who these rituals are for. In theory, it’s to get the baby to sleep, and they may or may not be effective. But the rituals definitely can help us feel like we’ve got a handle on things. A procedure is in place. There’s some order to the chaos. If we can just get the right stuffed animal, maybe we’ll get through the night. And get through being parents.

Duhigg: Possibly. That’s a tall order.

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