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Welcome to the Be Good podcast,
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where we explore the application of behavioral economics for good in order to nudge better business and better lives.
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Hi, and welcome to this episode of Be Good, brought to you by BVA Nudge Consulting, a global consultancy specializing in the application of behavioral science for successful data change. Every month, we get to speak with a leader in the field of behavioral science, psychology, and neuroscience. in order to get to know more about them, their work, and its application to emerging issues. My name is Eric Singler, Managing Director of the BVA family and Founder and CEO of BVA Energy Consulting. Today, I am delighted to be introducing this episode's guest, Professor Michael Morton. Mike is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he is a member of the Harvard Berdolz-Zeit Group. Mike's research focuses on behavioral economics and well-being. His work has been widely published in academic journals like Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, on CNN, in Forbes, and the New York Times. Mike has been selected, congrats Mike, for Wide Magazine Smart. list as one of the 50 people who will change the world. A big responsibility, I think. And his TED Talk covering the learnings of his first book, Happy Money, has been viewed more than 4.5 million times. So Mike has just published a new book, The Ritual Effect from Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Action, that will be at the heart of our conversation today. Mike, welcome to our Be Good podcast.
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Thank you so much for having me. It's great to get the chance to chat.
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So, Mike, before we talk about your amazing book, we would like to know a little more about yourself and your career. I think, correctly if I'm wrong, that you received your VA in psychology from Williams College and you're... PhD in social psychology from Princeton University before joining the MIT as a post-doctoral fellow from 2002 to 2005 and later Harvard Business School as an assistant professor and now professor. So a wonderful background. Can you tell us about how you come to be interested in psychology? and maybe more precisely in behavioral science.
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I think that, so as an undergraduate, I took a class on social psychology, like an intro social psychology class, and the professor was Steve Fine, who's a wonderful guy and a wonderful researcher and an amazing teacher, which I think is very important. But one of the things, I didn't really know much about psychology when I took this class. One of the things that he did was there's these classic experiments on imitation in kids about aggression, where they show an adult basically punching this, it's called a Bobo doll. It's an inflatable thing where if you punch it, it falls down and pops back up. They're old experiments, but it's basically if adults punch the doll, will little kids copy them later kind of thing. And he, Steve said he had the Bobo doll. It's like a. life-size kind of doll. And as he was explaining the experiment, he just started to like punch the doll a little bit. So he was talking like a professor, you know, like in the experiment, they were careful to something, but he also was punching his doll a little bit. And then finally, he kind of lost it and started attacking the doll and kicking it around. And for some reason, I thought, oh my gosh, that's not only is it a fascinating question, right? Which is how do kids learn aggression, kindness, you know, a very fundamental question about people. But also he was so clearly having fun teaching it. And both of those things were important. It was the intellectual curiosity, but also I think the spirit of joy in learning about people. And that's really what hooked me, I think. Both things are equally important to me. Of course the intellectual insight is number one, but can we love what we're doing and love that we're learning about people and actually really be rooting for the people we're studying also? We have a great view of humans and we're just trying to understand them better. So I think for me, that was the real. point at which I thought maybe I'd like to do something like that with my career.
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And can you tell us more about why your interest in well-being and happiness? You started today.
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My dissertation research was primarily on prejudice and discrimination and biased decision-making. And I've still continued that line of work 20 years later. But at some point, I was studying those things. And Liz Dunn, my eventual co-author on the book that you mentioned, Happy Money, she said, basically, you're being depressing and we're going to start studying happiness together. And this was a long time ago. This was when not a lot of people were studying well-being. This is 20, 25 years ago. Certainly there were giants who had been studying Ed Diener and people like that. And Danny Kahneman had started to study it, but it was still kind of a topic that a lot of people felt was too fuzzy. You know, how do we measure happiness? What is happiness? But Liz is, I don't know if you've met Liz, she's incredibly smart. And so I said, let's do it. And Liz said, the initial idea, she said, what if we could just show that when people spend their money, it makes them happier to spend it on somebody else than to spend it on themselves. Which is such as, and I mean this as a compliment, a simple idea, an elegant idea, but the implications are enormous. And so I was hooked right then. So I basically said, may I work on that idea with you? Because I thought it was such an amazing idea. And that really was what launched it. Was this idea of what are the kind of small everyday actions that people can take to change their daily well-being? The big questions, you know. unemployment, marriage, divorce, salary, those things, of course, are critical for our well-being. But I think because we were social psychologists, we were really interested in the kind of the smaller lived experience of our actions so that it's not what happens if you win the lottery, but what happens if you spend $5 on a friend instead of on yourself. Yeah.
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And I remember some experiments about the lottery winners. And here again, it's not so critical. A clear, meaning you could earn a big lottery, eating trees, if I well understood, your happiness during maybe two years and after you restart at your starting point, I would say.
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I used to ask a question, which was think of your friend, friend or family member who's the happiest person you know. And people can usually think of one or two people right away. And then I say, is that person the wealthiest person you know? Almost never. Just not. They might be. It's not that wealth is bad, but it just isn't the key to being a really, really happy person. It's an input, but there's so many other things that matter.
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Okay. We will talk later a little about this. And last about your background. Could you share with us any mentors that had a particularly strong influence on you? Any researchers or other people?
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My Steve Fine, for sure, who I mentioned, who was my undergraduate professor, that was the first person I did a research project with as well, and kind of introduced me to the whole idea of social science research in a way. My dissertation advisor was John Darley, who was famous for his research on bystander intervention. in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And he showed many things, but one of the things that he showed was that the more people that witness an emergency, the less likely someone is to get help, which is completely counterintuitive at first, because you'd think the more people, the more help. But of course, what he showed is that people diffuse the responsibility, and so everyone looks around and says, well, maybe she'll help, maybe he'll help, and nobody helps. It's a really powerful, powerful idea. And when I was in graduate school, whenever there was a situation in the world where bystanders had failed to help, they would interview John Darley on the news. And sometimes he would have to explain why the person didn't get help. But sometimes someone would say, they would say to someone who actually helped, they would say, well, why did you decide, you know, nobody was helping. Why did you decide to help? And the person would say, well, you know, I took this psychology class as an undergrad. And I remember this experiment where this guy showed that the more people who are around. the less likely anybody is to help. And I thought, oh my, it's happening right now. I should really help them. So this, my advisor was literally somebody whose research kind of saved lives. It was a very, very high standard as a doctoral student to think, oh, my gosh, how am I going to ever have that kind of impact? But I think the cleverness of the idea, you know, again, that more people means less help. And then the practical implications of that being like so profoundly important. It changed the way I thought about the whole enterprise, you know, that you could you could I have not had that kind of impact. But but but as a thing to shoot for, I was very, very motivating.
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Before we talk about your new book, I can't resist, I told you that I have loved Happy Money, and I would like to ask some, maybe just one question about Happy Money that you have co-authored with Professor Lisdon, with this fundamental question. How can we spend our money to create happiness for ourselves and those around us? Give some good advice to our listeners.
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The first thing I would say is kind of a disclaimer, which is one thing that's great to do is not spend your money and save it. So we have other research that is, in fact, about encouraging people to save more right now, to save more for retirement. Exactly. So saving is great. And setting yourself up to have a good retirement is so important. However, it's also the case that people are going to spend some of their money. So if you accept that fact that it's not, we can't just save everything, we're going to live lives, then out of that pool of money, what should people do with it? That was kind of the guiding question. It's not that you should just spend more and more money and then you'll be happier. It's as a portfolio of what you do with your money. There's saving and then there's lots of other things that you can do. And the way that we started the research on this was we just asked people to tell us how they spent their money. And we also asked them how happy they were. I mean, very, very simple, you know, research question, which is just what correlates with what. And of course, later we did the experiments, etc. But really, we just asked people, you know, how did you spend your money? You could look at your credit card statement this month. Just look back through it and think, what categories am I spending in? You know, these are bills, these are expenses, these might be dinners out. You know, you could really think about how you're spending your money. And what we found was that the amount of money that people spent on themselves, which is like bills and expenses and stuff that we have to do, is just not very predictive of your well-being. It's not negatively predictive. In other words, it's not that if you spend money on yourself, you're sad. It's just that there doesn't seem to be much of a relationship. And that was the first insight, really, which is just, you know, sometimes people think, oh, people who spend a lot are miserable. We don't tend, I mean, maybe at the extremes, but we don't tend to see that relationship. But then the question was, is there anything that's positively correlated? You know, are there any buckets that actually are positively correlated? And the ones that pop up, not just in our research, but across many research programs, buying experiences tends to be one. So given the choice between buying a thing and buying an experience. Tends to be the case for most people that experiences result in more happiness. And the research that we did in particular was, as I mentioned, rather than buy a thing for yourself, why don't you use the money on somebody else? Buy a friend lunch, donate to a charity, very broadly thinking about what it means to give rather than focus on yourself. And there again, across lots and lots of correlational research, but also experimental research, we tend to see, again, spending on yourself doesn't just... It doesn't make you sad. It just doesn't do that much for you. And giving seems to, for more people, more of the time, result in a change in happiness.
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So I encourage our listeners, if they're interested to read Happy Money, they will learn a lot. But Mike, as I mentioned earlier, your recent book, The Ritual Effect, was published, I think it was in April 2024. And before we discuss precisely the content of it, can you tell us more about the inspiration behind writing it? How did the idea for the book come to you, especially because you share that at the beginning of your book that you were personally a ritual skeptic? I was very surprised.
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So it's interesting to think. I probably... It's about a decade of doing research on rituals now, something like that. Maybe a little more, but a long time, I guess, is my point. And I'd started studying rituals in a few projects, but... Um, really from the perspective of sort of people seem to do this a lot. What's going on? You know, why do they do it? What impact do they have on our emotions? But I wasn't really studying it as a, some research comes directly from yourself. You know, you, you notice yourself doing something and you say, my gosh, why did I do that? And then you have an idea for a research project. Rituals for me were not that. It wasn't I looked at myself and thought, why am I doing this? It was, I was looking at the world and saying, why? why are people doing this and then trying to study it. And then, as you mentioned, so 10 years ago, we started the research on rituals. Eight years, almost nine years ago now, what happened was my wife and I had a daughter. And if anyone has ever had a daughter or son or whatever, you know that it's a big event in your life, very stressful, a lot of uncertainty, not sure what to do, not sure if you're doing a good job. And one of the things that we did We didn't sit down and say, let's develop a ritual that will probably help us. That's not usually how rituals happen. But when we were putting our daughter to bed and we wanted her to sleep, we started doing a very elaborate series of events. Like, read these specific books, then do these two songs, then we need these three stuffed animals, you know. Yes, the kiss or one, and people say one or two or three kisses. I mean, you know, when you leave the room, you blow a kiss. I mean, very, very specific, elaborate things. And it got more and more, you know, we kind of kept increasing it. If we missed a step, we would sometimes start over from the beginning. And if we couldn't find the stuffed animal, it was like panic. You know what I mean? No, this is, we're doomed. And I realized, of course, I realized at some point, my gosh, we just spontaneously, in the face of great uncertainty and stress about caring for our daughter, we came up with a ritual. Not a ritual that was, it's not in a 3,000-year-old book. That, you know, it's these three songs and these two books and these three stuffed animals. Those rituals I hope we talk about are incredibly important in our lives as well. But these were ones that we just made up on the fly. We just looked around at what was in the environment. There was music, there were stuffed animals, there were books, there were blankets. And we thought, let's make some sequence with these, see if we can help her sleep. I think in the end, we probably didn't help her sleep very much. But we actually, I think, helped ourselves. feel like we had some sense of control over a very stressful situation. And of course, if you ask other parents, did you do anything like this to help your kid? Of course, everybody says, oh my God. And in fact, I teach an undergraduate course of first-year students. They're 18 years old. And sometimes I ask them to interview their parents and ask them if they remember their nighttime ritual, their bedtime ritual. And first off, their parents remember it exactly. And they say they often get very emotional. And I think that really shows the power of it, right? Which is we use them when we really need them. And they have such emotional resonance for us sometimes that just remembering what it was like to have your six-month-old trying to sing these songs, it brings you back in such a powerful and almost visceral way. In a way, I think that looking at pictures doesn't quite do. You know, I think one of the things... Over time, I've learned about rituals is that they're really powerful memory triggerers for us in a way that's often very, very nice. It brings back things that we'd otherwise forget.
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Kind of Madeleine de Proust.
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Yes, exactly.
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Okay. So could you, you have started to do this, but could you define more precisely what you mean by a ritual and maybe specifically what is the difference between a ritual? and habits. We have interviewed some years ago, Wendy Wood, about this wonderful book, Good Habits, Bad Habits. So I would like to better understand the difference between ritual and habit.
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The first thing I want to say is that good habits are great. So when I juxtapose rituals and habits, what I'm not saying is habits are not good and rituals are good. We should, I wish I had better habits. We should all have good habits. The research on helping people to have better habits is amazing and incredibly important. So I was going to say, as a disclaimer right up front, it's not that habits aren't incredibly important for us to work on. I do think though with habits, you know, the point of habits, really, when you look at the research, Wendy's research and others, is you want them to become automatic. You want to, you know, if you want to floss your teeth every day. What you want is the habit to become automatic, where you just do it thoughtlessly. Every time you brush your teeth, you floss. It's just part of the habit. And that means that you've probably developed the habit really well. And again, that's fantastic because we should all have healthy behaviors. But it's not clear that we want our days all to be kind of automated or on autopilot because it's a little bit emotionless and dry. You know, if you think of someone who had a life of perfect habits, you know, they always ate the right thing. They always exercise at this time. They always did all the things after whatever, 40 years, they'd be very healthy for sure. But. would they have had kind of an emotionally rich, interesting life? Yeah, if they do the exact same thing every single day. And that's an unfair comparison, but that was on my mind to think, I wonder if partly what rituals do is they bump us out of the automation of everyday life and just going through the motions and turn things that are otherwise mundane into something more emotional. For many people, the example that comes to mind is their morning coffee or tea. Technically, you're just putting liquid in your mouth. You know, I mean, if we really break it down, it's not that interesting. But many people say, what I do with tea in the morning, and they have a very elaborate, specific thing that they've been doing for years with their tea or with their coffee or what they do with their spouse with coffee in the morning. They're taking just liquid in a cup. And they're turning it into something that has more meaning and emotion. And for me, that starts to be the difference between habits and rituals, is that rituals tend to have a bit more emotional resonance than habits, which again are supposed to be on autopilot and automatic if we're going to get them done.
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It is what you call emotion generators.
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Yeah, and there's lots of ways we generate emotions for sure. I think rituals are one that we see. Across many domains of life, humans have, for thousands of years, turned to rituals as one of the ways to help manage and generate different emotions.
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Okay, Mike, now I would like to come into what you call do-it-yourself rituals and the relation with a very famous effect in behavioral science that you have identified some years ago, I think, with Dan Ariely and Daniel Mok. the Ikea effect. You also mentioned that there is a ritual effect, a ritual change. Can you tell us more about the Ikea effect and these consequences, ritual changes?
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So in the research on the Ikea effect, a very simple insight again, which was just you notice that you or people you know or your spouse or partner have things in the house that they made themselves, like a pot or a mug or a watercolor or a bookshelf or something, and they insist on keeping it with them their entire life. And it's ugly. It's just, it's just, it's not good. And the question was like, well, why do we have, and I have one too, I'm not pointing fingers at anybody, why do we have these things that really aren't that good, but that we made? And we value them really highly. And that was the initial thing, which is what's going on there. And what we see in the experiments, of course, is that when you put effort into making something, you imbue it with more value than the market believes it has, I guess, in a sense. So earlier in my career, I probably would have described the IKEA effect as kind of like a mistake. In other words, like I'm overvaluing the thing that I made, but the world knows it's worthless. So I'm off, you know. The older I get, though, the more I think it's kind of amazing. It's a gift, really, that when we invest ourselves in things, we can come to see them as really special and valuable. Because again, it means we can take really boring things, like clay or wood, and turn them into something that really has a lot of meaning for us. So I think I've changed over time on the, is it a mistake or is it a gift? And thinking of the same thing with... rituals, you know, in the way that you can buy products that are pre-made and still love them, you can also use rituals that are pre-made. You can use rituals with thousands of years of history. And of course, we use them all the time. And they're incredibly important in our lives. You know, weddings, funerals, birthday parties, anniversaries, these are all things that have come down through the generations, sometimes through religion, sometimes through culture, sometimes from our families. but they have a deep history and we perform them the same way that they've been performed on purpose. However, we also started to see in the research that people were doing those for sure. And they were doing other stuff. They were freelancing. They were coming up with things on the fly all the time. So when we ask people, what's a good example? We asked people in romantic relationships about their rituals. And they say, well, you know, we had a wedding. And then every year we celebrate our anniversary. And in some countries, Valentine's Day. You know, of course, we go out for Valentine's Day. So they do those rituals for sure. But then we said, is there anything else that the two of you do that's special to you and unique to the two of you and has a lot of meaning and you make sure to do it every so often? And then people told us not about Valentine's Day, but about little tiny behaviors that the two of them had generated themselves. My favorite one, I don't know why ever, was a couple that said, every time before we eat, we clink our silverware together. I think it resonates in part. First off, there's no 3000 year old text that says clink your silverware. You know, they're not drawing on history. They came up with it themselves. And I think I love it because few things are more boring or utilitarian than a fork. I mean, the whole point of a fork is just to stab and put it in your mouth. And they can turn it into something else about their relationship. And that's the DIY aspect of them, I think. For sure, we all use established traditional rituals at very important points in our life. But we also do these other kind that we very often come up with ourselves. And that again, got all the way back to the kind of spending money, not just looking at, you know, your income and things like that. But what do you do on a daily basis? It's a bit the same with rituals where we have the huge ones that play a huge role in our lives. But under the surface, we also have these little ones that we do. Every day or every week or every month. And we just wondered what role are those playing? Why do we use them? When do we use them? And then what effect do they have on our emotions?
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And what I think is absolutely critical is what you call the ritual effect, meaning ritual changes. Could you tell us more about this?
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So people who are ritual skeptics, let's say, and there are many, who will say, I don't do anything like that. You know, I don't, that's not, that's not something I do. And so, but I can ask, you know, like, have you ever made a cake and frosted it very carefully and it's beautiful. And then before you serve the cake, you stick wax candles in the cake and light them on fire so that wax drips all over the cake. And then put the cake in front of somebody who probably has like the flu and have them blow all over the cake to blow the thing out. And then there's smoke and then. And then everybody eats the cake with wax and germ, you know, I'm exaggerating. But of course, people say, oh, yeah, no, that's a birthday cake. And I say, what? You know, tell me about that experience. They say, well, you know, you sing and everybody's happy. And it's a way to wish the person, you know, good luck in their next year and celebrate them. And I say, yeah, that's what rituals are. So so, you know, if you think about the role they play in our lives, another one in every culture has a cheers. In Gaelic, it's sláinte, you know, it has a, you take liquid in a cup, everybody raises it up, clinks it together, and then drinks. There's no practical reason to raise your glass and clink it. It doesn't improve the, you know, whatever. But we do it because it's a bonding experience, and we're all saying good luck and health to each other. And so those kinds of rituals, again, they're very small. It's not like you clink glasses and your life is changed forever. Of course not. But they change the experience in the group as well. And you take a cake or liquid in a glass, and again, you can turn it into something that's more than that. And that, I think, is what's so special for me about these kinds of rituals. The little ones that we come up with is that they take mundane things, and we're very creative in using the things in our environment to actually imbue them with more.
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And again, with emotion at the earth of this. For you, what are the primary psychological benefits of rituals?
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It seems in many rituals, but not all rituals, one of the underlying features is control. That when we feel uncertainty or we feel out of control, humans have, again, for thousands of years, turned to different types of rituals to re-exert a feeling of control. Not all rituals are about control, but many of them have some feature like that. And it seems to be, again, if we feel uncertain and out of control, there's lots of things that we do to try to feel control.
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But one of them is, I think, this turn to ritual. Maybe my favorite research ever, actually, is B.F. Skinner, who people may know. He's a psychologist who studied rewards and behaviorism. And he was very interested in, you know, how do you incentivize pigeons to peck a button three times in order to get food? And, you know, very learning, very mechanical model of how to train. people to behave, pigeons, I guess, to behave in a certain way. Very super useful research, fascinating research. But he did this one version of that where, so usually what happens is, you know, they're called Skinner boxes and it's like a box that has buttons and levers and stuff like that. And if a pigeon figures out the correct sequence, like press the lever twice and peck the button, the food comes. So the question is, how long does it take them to learn the pattern and then the food comes and they get good at it? In this particular thing, what he did was he just had the food come completely randomly, independent of what the pigeons were pecking on the Skinner box. So what pigeons should do is nothing. In other words, as soon as you learn that the food's just coming randomly, you should just sit back and wait for the food. And of course, that's not at all what pigeons do. What they do is they keep pecking and pressing things. And what he says is that they came up with... an idiosyncratic sequence of behaviors that, well, you know, this pigeon was bob the head twice, peck that button twice, peck that lever. But the pigeon in the next room was doing, you know, bob the head six times, peck the lever nine times. And then they kept doing it. And so what's going on? So there's so many fascinating things about this, obviously. One is in the face of truly uncertainty and lack of control, we don't say, well, there's nothing we can do. We say, I'm still going to try. I got to do something to get some control. Exactly. And it's not that we land on the same thing. It's not as though faced with these situations, everybody says, aha, it's three head nods. It's that each pigeon comes up with their own idiosyncratic way of trying. I mean, I'm projecting that the pigeons were trying to feel control. Obviously, it's a metaphor in some sense. And yet, if pigeons are doing this to try to feel control, of course, you could imagine that. When humans are faced with that kind of uncertainty as well, we also might engage in some ritualistic behavior to try again to get that sense of control back.
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Mike, now I'd like to get into the details and start talking about ritual for ourself. You mentioned that athletes, and we have some in mind, and other high performers use rituals to boost their performance. And could you share first some examples?
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You know, if you want to waste an entire day of your life, type in athletes'names or singers'names or musicians, any celebrity, and then type the word ritual, and then click search. And it is just extraordinary how many of these high performers have something. Very specific and idiosyncratic that they do before they...
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But Nadal is the king of rituals.
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Exactly. Nadal is my favorite. And he's actually, if I show his ritual, people in the audience say, that's Nadal. I mean, it's so part of who he is. But before his serve, he has a very elaborate sequence of things that he does, including he picks his wedgie before every serve. You know, his shorts are... And the question is, what's going on? you know if all of these people are doing this stuff before high stakes performances why why are they doing them and what's so interesting is if you if you ask them um so nadal and specifically actually gets asked a lot what are you doing why do you do this crazy thing before every serve and he'll say things like uh you know look i know i don't need to do it but when i do it i feel like i'm ready to go And I think that's a very interesting psychology. And unfortunately, it's not the case that if I copy Nadal's pre-serve routine, I'm now magically as good as him. You know, I wish that's how rituals work, but they just don't, right? They, I think, can affect our emotions. You know, he's saying that he feels, after he does it, like he can go do it. And that's what many of these performers say, is that, of course I could go on stage without doing this thing before, and I'm sure it would be fine. you know, I'm still Keith Richards or Serena Williams or whoever I am, but I'm going to turn to them in this moment of stress and uncertainty so that I feel psychologically like I'm ready to go.
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And for us, for normal people, what can we learn from these high-performance rituals?
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It's funny, if you ask people, people will say, wow, that's really crazy, you know, that thing that Nadal does or whatever. And then if you ask people, have you ever, you know, what do you do if you have a big meeting at work or you have to give a presentation at work? Is there anything you do beforehand to get ready? And people say, you know. Reasonable things like, well, I make sure I have all my materials ready to go and things like that. But an astonishingly high number of people, given how crazy it is, will say, what I do is I go into the bathroom at work. I look around under the stalls to make sure nobody else is in there. And then I talk to myself in the mirror. It's very common. And many people will say, I don't do it every time, but I have done that. You know, at least once in my life, I... I looked at myself in a mirror and said, you can do this. You've got this. And on the one hand, that's crazy. You know, who are we talking to when we say you've got this? On the other hand, compared to what? You know, there's lots of ways to try to manage anxiety. We can, of course, take medication. We can have therapy. You know, there's lots of effective ways. But again, one of the things that people turn to in these situations is some kind of a ritual. And again, they say, it just makes me feel like I'm, I'm. I'm readier to face the meeting after I do my little ritual. And by the way, they also say if they get interrupted, they feel less ready. So it isn't just that, you know, add rituals everywhere in your life and your life's going to be amazing. I wish that were true. That's not how they work at all. It's a kind of a risk and reward thing, right? If you can get it done the way you like, people say, I feel good. But if you can't get it done the way you like, people say, actually, now I'm going to feel off for the entire time. So they're almost like a... in a weird they're always going to provoke emotion but sometimes it might be positive and sometimes it actually might be negative i hope we can talk more about that as well because they're often rituals are in the service of feeling a positive emotion but they often also are related to producing negative emotions as well it's not that they're just good it's that they're emotional across the wide spectrum of the emotions that we experience there is a also a top
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which I think is interesting is how do rituals influence our capacity for self-control and daily discipline?
- Speaker #0
If you look, one of the fun things about honestly studying rituals is, of course, that people, humans have been studying them for years and documenting them for years. So you can look back, you know, literally to the first writings that exist that we have from humans. And there's already rituals in them, like Gilgamesh. A big part of Gilgamesh is he's already making ritualistic sacrifices to the gods. So we have this kind of extraordinary history of human rituals. And one of the things that you see is that they're often associated with extreme acts of self-control. So religious rituals, for example, when you see people praying for six days straight or standing for an incredibly long period of time. Very often that kind of self-control is paired with ritualistic behavior. Now, can we say, therefore, that it's just the ritual that's allowing them to do this? Of course not. There's many things that determine our behavior. But we very, very often see these links, almost like natural links, between this behavior and this type of ritual in the world.
- Speaker #1
Now, I would like to speak about another key topic in your book. rituals in social relationships. Can you tell us how can rituals help solidify our connection with others? And we know from the science of happiness that connection with others is something quite important.
- Speaker #0
We did this project a few years ago. So I'll say one of the fun things about studying rituals is it's almost like a When we started studying it, we would go talk to somebody and they would say, hey, have you ever looked at rituals in this domain? We would say, oh no, we haven't. And then we'd do a project on that domain. And then we'd talk to somebody else and they'd say, hey, did you ever look at rituals in this domain? We'd say, no, we haven't. And we'd do it over there. It's a very fun and generative topic because they're so ubiquitous. But one of the things we did was people said, hey, have you ever done family rituals? What's up with family rituals? And it's very salient now because the holidays are upon us, which is a big stressor for many people. But family. And, you know, we can ask people, let's say one of the studies we did was specifically for people who celebrate Christmas. So we said, do you and your family do anything for Christmas that's... special to your family that's unique, that you make sure to do every year? We don't say, do you have a ritual? Because people think, you know, people in robes with candles type of thing. But we ask them these other questions. And many, many families will say, yes, we do. And then we ask them questions like, well, do you gather every year? Or do you not gather every year as a family? And how much do you enjoy the time with your family? And again, this is correlational because we can't randomly assign people to families, you know. I wish we could, but we can't. But correlationally, what you see is when people say my family has a ritual, they're more likely to report also that they continue to get together and that they like the day better. Now, again, maybe people who like their family develop rituals and that's the causal direction. We don't know. But as a signal of your family, it is the case that if you have a ritual, I can predict much better whether you're actually going to get on a plane and fly home to see your parents. or not. So there you see this, they serve almost like as a glue, as a, you don't have to see your family every day, you're not required to, but you are supposed to see them on these days. And it is one of the ways that families stay intact is actually by these almost culturally forcing mechanisms to say, go see your mom and dad once a year. And otherwise, sometimes we might not see our families at all because life just gets very busy. So there, um, On the one hand, it's decorating a tree. Who cares? On the other hand, they play this really central role in families continuing to be families over time.
- Speaker #1
There is also social ritual which can help in difficult times like grief. What role do rituals play in helping us process and manage this?
- Speaker #0
tough situation grief was one of the examples where um a great example of where we asked people about rituals and when we asked couples they said you know uh weddings and valentine's day and things when we ask people about grief you know think of somebody that um you were close to who you lost what did what did you do of course people say funerals you know they'll whatever their faith dictates they'll say for one day two days five days we did this And then that's over. And then you're kind of supposed to go back to life. And I wish grief worked that way, you know, that you could just have a funeral and then feel better about the loss. Unfortunately, as anybody who's experienced grief knows, that's not how it works at all. So what do we do for the rest of the days when we're still grieving? What do we do? And of course, of course, we do things like seek out social support, seek out therapy if we need it. You know, there's many, many good things that we should do when we're grieving. But one of the things that people told us is that they came up with their own little idiosyncratic ways of honoring the person. One woman that sticks with me said, I wash his car every weekend the way he used to. And you can tell exactly what's going on right away. And on the one hand, why would you wash your car that you're not driving? And on the other hand, clearly, we don't know a lot about it because this is just a survey. But you can feel that he probably loved this car and washed it every weekend. He passed away. She decided that one way to honor him was to continue to wash the car the way that he did. There is no ancient text that says wash a car after somebody passes away. There weren't even cars. So we know that these are ones that people have come up with themselves. And yet you can feel how important and emotionally resonant they are.
- Speaker #1
Mike, at BVN Consulting, we are working quite a lot for... public and private organization. And your work on ritual is also about ritual at work, which is also very interesting for a large part of our audience. Could you tell us why are rituals so valuable in a professional context, especially for time, team spirit?
- Speaker #0
For sure. It's funny because if you ask teams at work about rituals, What they think of initially are things that the company or their manager made them do. Like their worst managers, they say, my manager is one of these people who watches a TED talk or listens to a podcast over the weekend and then comes in on Monday morning and says, now we're going to do this thing like this and nobody wants to do it. And so the initial feeling on rituals at work is quite negative, right? Which is these people are always telling us to do this stuff and we don't want to do it. But when we ask teams at work, not about those, but we say, again, exact same question, actually, as we ask couples or families. Is there anything that you do as a team? That's unique to your team. That's special to you that you make sure to do every day or every week or regularly. Lots of teams say, you know what there is, and they don't tell us about the kind that were mandated. They tell us about ones that they came up with themselves. One team, and they're very simple, but one team, their ritual was each week on one day of the week, I would get lunch for everybody else. And then on every other day of the week, someone else would get lunch for everybody else. So it's just lunch. You know, we're going to eat lunch. It's just lunch. But what this team is doing is on one day of the week, I take care of everyone on the team. And every other day of the week, the team takes care of me. They're taking, again, it's like they're taking sandwiches and turning them into something that has more meaning. And those kinds of rituals we see are correlated with the meaning you feel at work. Again, there's lots of things that determine your sense of meaning at work. But one of them seems to be This feeling that we have, that when we have these meaningful rituals with our teams, we see the work that we're doing with those teams as more meaningful as well.
- Speaker #1
And could you share with us some of the keys to successful workplace rituals?
- Speaker #0
So what I do when I work with companies on rituals is what they want is kind of a, I give them one. You know, like science has shown that if employees do this. seven claps and nine stomps and yell this, then everything will be great. And that's almost never how rituals work because they're so idiosyncratic. So what we do instead is we give teams time to think about what they already do and think about if they want to develop something else on their team as well. And I give very little guidance on purpose to the teams because I want them to generate it and have ownership over it. It's not always the case that the company loves that because they kind of want standardization, you know, and how long it's going to last and all that kind of thing. But those often lead to reactants instead of positive feelings. So it's interesting that there's a tension between what I think are rituals that really resonate with people, which are the ones that they come up with themselves, and a desire to have, of course, some kind of, can't we all just do it Friday at two o'clock so that, you know, we all are on the same page.
- Speaker #1
which is a kind of bottom-up ritual versus top-down rituals. We have seen that social rituals can help to foster team spirit, but also it can contribute to division. Could you tell us more about this?
- Speaker #0
I'm glad you asked because, again, this is a case where rituals can have positive effects and a case where rituals can have negative effects as well. They're, again, not just... More rituals is always better. So in the same way we see that with teams, if they have rituals, that they tend to find more meaning in their work, but also trust each other a bit more. And we do experiments, you know, we can randomly assign people to teams and have them do rituals or not and measure their trust. And we can see, in fact, that doing a ritual with your team can increase trust. However, we can also then say, hey, look at this other team who does a different ritual. How do you feel about them? And what happens is people who do rituals that are different from ours, we punish them because they're doing it wrong. And I think that really is the key, is that if you're doing a ritual and you think it's good, we're great. If you're doing a ritual and you think it's correct, that's trouble. Because if my way is correct, obviously every other way is incorrect. And that's when we start to get conflict. And it's true in romantic relationships, and it's true culturally, that if our way of doing this is the right way to do the ritual, then I have to make other people do it my way as well. And so we see wonderful benefits of group cohesion, but they can also come paired with dislike of other groups who are, again, in quotes, doing it wrong because we're doing it right.
- Speaker #1
And any thought on what... type of solution we can use to reduce division?
- Speaker #0
Extremely.
- Speaker #1
Which is a big topic, I think, in the world right now.
- Speaker #0
If I knew that answer, I would be so, so happy. I think, not our research, but other people's research, I think really points to the importance of thinking about cross-cutting ties. So if I think about my political beliefs, and then I find out someone else has different political beliefs. I'm on the, I'm correct and you're incorrect. You must be terrible. And of course, they're thinking the same thing about me. But cross-cutting ties can be, you know, we're both from... California, or we both really like hockey, or whatever it might be, that we have these different social connections. And then that starts to make it more complicated in a sense, but complicated in a good way, which is it's not the only difference between us is not just this. We have other differences. We have other similarities. And the research shows that when you encourage people to look for those, it can reduce a little bit. the feelings that they have when they just think of somebody else as the opposite of them on one particular dimension.
- Speaker #1
Mike, we are now unfortunately close to the end of our conversation, but I'd like to ask you two final questions. First, as an expert in behavioral science, and second, as an expert in science of happiness. So first, how do you see the future of behavioral science? Do you have any fears and hopes? that you would like to share?
- Speaker #0
I think one very positive development is testing things at scale and testing things in the world to see... Laboratory experiments are amazing. They can tell us so much about how humans work and how the mind works and everything. But if we want to then bring it out to the world, we have to go test it in many, many contexts to see when it works. and when it doesn't. You mentioned Katie Milkman, who's, of course, leading on. Exactly. It's a great example. Leading these mega studies, you know, where you test many interventions across many different places and really try to get a sense of what actually matters in the real world. And other people, of course, doing things like meta-analyses of big literature. Meta-analyses have some limitations to them as well. But again, trying to look across a body of knowledge. To say what seems to be the regularities in that, that I think is something that used to be much, much harder to do. And now it's a bit easier to do. It's still very hard to do, but a little bit easier to do. And those are the kinds of things that I think are very exciting. It's like, let's find out of all the insights we have, which are the ones that play out the biggest out in the real world.
- Speaker #1
Okay, thanks a lot. And now as an expert in the science of... happiness that I like very much. What research terms do you find most interesting to explore?
- Speaker #0
That have not already been explored.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Or to confirm previous results.
- Speaker #0
I'll shout out my colleague here, Ashley Willans, who does research on how to spend your time. And she did some work. She did some work with Liz Dunn and I when she was a graduate student. But the question she's asking, and it's such a great question, is, we're experts in humans or happiness or whatever. If somebody says, hey, how should I spend my time today? We could say, oh, spend some of it with family and friends. And people say, how much? I mean, there's some really basic, is it better to spend time with? Two acquaintances or one close friend? Very, very basic questions about how we use our time that we know some things about. But it's it's every day when we get up, that's the decision we're making, right? Is how am I going to use my time today? I think all of the researchers and others that's happening in that domain, I just always find completely fascinating. Again, because it's this everyday kind, you know, what should you do today to change your happiness over the course of today?
- Speaker #1
Thanks a lot, Mike. It was a fascinating conversation, and I am sure that our audience will be very happy to learn from you. Mike, is there anything you would like to leave our listeners with where they can find more about you and your work,
- Speaker #0
maybe website or LinkedIn or I don't know? My website is very boring. I'll warn you. And it's also boring because it's just it's literally Michael Norton dot com. The only interesting thing on it is we developed a quiz, a rituals quiz. There's a link that says quiz, I'm sure. And it's just a brief quiz that you can take. And it kind of asks you about rituals in different domains of life. And it's kind of fun to go through and see where you're doing them and where you're not. It also can be fun to have your spouse or partner do it as well and kind of compare across them. Just to get a quick sense of... Where they're already happening, where you might want to try them out, and whether you and your spouse are aligned on what you're up to.
- Speaker #1
Okay. Thanks a lot again, Mike.
- Speaker #0
Thank you. It's great to chat.
- Speaker #1
Be Good,
- Speaker #0
a podcast by the BVA Nudge Unit.
