The Psychological Potency of Ritualized Behaviors

Why do we sometimes push elevator call buttons repeatedly?

When waiting in a tall building for an elevator to arrive, for which the illumination of the call button that you have pushed indicates that your request has registered, have you sometimes returned to the control panel and pushed that illuminated call button again — and, sometimes, again, and yet again? I confess to doing so a few times, either when I have been in a terrific hurry or when, for whatever reason, the elevator seemed inordinately slow.

On the basis of what are, by now, dozens of empirical studies, including many of his own, the cognitive scientist of religions, Dimitris Xygalatas, argues in his new book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, that this is but one of innumerable examples of humans’ natural penchant for performing rituals when they are experiencing anxiety or stress. Our experiences with elevators are not usually stressful. But when we are late for an important appointment or when they involve what we take to be excessive delays, they can provoke frustration and anxiety.

Culturally Sustained Rituals Activate Intuitions About Their Effectiveness

We often feel anxious when we sense diminished control over events. In response to such circumstances, humans tend to exhibit ritualized (i.e., non-instrumental, causally opaque) behaviors, from repeatedly pushing already-activated call buttons for elevators to performing rain dances. Xygalatas suggests that ritualization appears to “trigger intuitive biases related to causal reasoning.” He cites experimental research by Cristine Legare and André Souza indicating that rituals’ repetition and redundancy and people’s greater uncertainty about a situation both increase people’s confidence in rituals’ causal potency.

Why do people have such intuitions? Cultural materials warrant many rituals’ efficacy. Recall that in 2009, out of an abundance of legal caution, President Obama took his oath of office a second time in the Map Room of the White House in front of a small group of reporters and staff. At Obama’s swearing-in during his inauguration on the previous day, Chief Justice Roberts had misplaced the adverb “faithfully” when administering the oath to Obama, resulting, crucially, in wording that was not word-for-word identical to the presidential oath specified in the U.S. Constitution.

Religious rituals are probably the best illustrations here. They are linked with presumptions about the gods and their expectations and instructions for carrying such rituals out. Those rituals’ connections to superhuman agents, in effect, certify them as effective.

Intuitions About Rituals’ Causal Capacities

Are such cultural connections necessary? Xygalatas and his colleagues wondered whether ritualized behaviors would still elicit intuitions about their causal import unaided by such cultural support. Do people show a natural psychological inclination to accord rituals causal power? One fascinating experiment that they conducted suggests that we do.

Xygalatas and his colleagues had participants watch videos of college basketball players stepping up to the foul line and initiating foul shots. Crucially, the videos ended before the ball descended toward the hoop. In 10 of the videos, participants saw the players go through various pre-shot rituals (such as bouncing or kissing the ball). In the other 10 videos, participants saw no rituals performed before the shot. The 20 videos (averaging 5.5 seconds each) were presented in a randomized order to each participant. Participants were asked to predict whether or not the foul shot in each video was successful. In each case, participants were free to watch the video repeatedly before offering their prognostication about a shot’s success.

Participants exhibited a strong bias in favor of the success of the foul shots in which they had observed the shooter going through some pre-shot ritual or other. They expected those shots to be successful 30 percent more often than shots for which they had observed no pre-shot ritual. Participants’ familiarity with the game or individual players in the videos had no effect on this bias. Novices, fans, and players (as determined by a Basketball IQ test each participant took) all showed the bias. This suggests that, although cultural support helps, rituals, simply by virtue of their forms, elicit intuitions about their causal effectiveness.