Source: White House Archives

A common feature of is habits. My dogs, for example, know that in the morning they should run downstairs to the door and wait for me to take them out for a walk, after which they wait by another door for me to get their food for breakfast. Chances are, you have lots of habits like this that govern your day.

In addition, though, you probably have several behaviors you engage in that do not serve any clear instrumental purpose. In many religions, for example, people light candles as an act of prayer or remembrance. Students and faculty at the University of Texas sing “The Eyes of Texas” at sporting events with their hands raised in the “Hook ‘em Horns” gesture. Students in public schools in the US put their hand over their heart as they recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

These behaviors are rituals. A ritual is a behavior that people engage in routinely where the behavior itself is not crucial for some goal but is performed anyhow. For example, it is possible to watch a sporting event without singing a song and making hand gestures, but fans of the University of Texas engage in this ritual routinely anyhow.

These rituals have a number of influences on human behavior. For example, studies suggest that performing a behavior simultaneously with other people can lead you to feel more connected to them socially. Repetition of rituals may also be useful for helping people to enter a meditative state.

A paper in the June, 2018 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Allen Tian, Juliana Schroeder, Geral Haubl, Jane Risen, Michal Norton, and Francesca Gino explores whether rituals influence people’s ability to engage in .

Self-control is required when people have a tradeoff between options in which one option has its benefits primarily in the short-term, while the other has its benefits primarily in the long-term. For example, eating a slice of cake has short-term benefits (it is delicious), but has potential consequences for people trying to lose weight in the long-term. Eating a carrot is not as good as a slice of cake in the short-term (for most people), but is a more desirable food for people trying to lose weight.

In one study, the researchers recruited women interested in losing weight. They asked the women to track the food they ate for 5 days using a diary app on their smartphone. In one condition of the study, women were given instructions to be mindful of what they were eating. They were supposed to think about losing weight and try to eat fewer calories. In the ritual condition of the study, women were asked to engage in a pre-meal ritual to remind them to eat less. This ritual involved asking them to cut their food into small pieces and arrange it symmetrically on the plate and tapping an eating utensil on the food three times before eating it. Overall, the women who performed this ritual ate over 10% fewer calories per day than those who were just mindful about their eating.

Other studies in this paper gave people a ritual to perform several times, a control condition with no specific instructions, or a condition in which people performed a series of random actions, but did not repeat the actions. The studies either asked people to make a self-control tradeoff involving food (such as selecting a carrot versus a chocolate) or involving social obligations (such as going to a party versus volunteering to help poor children).

In these studies, performing a ritual made people more likely to select the option with the long-term benefit. Participant ratings suggested that the ritual influenced behavior by increasing people’s feeling that they could be disciplined and exert willpower. The ritual did not influence people’s beliefs about the importance of the goal they were pursuing.

It is not entirely clear why engaging in a ritual makes people feel more disciplined. One interesting thing about rituals, though, is that they have to be performed in a specific way to be done right. For example, fans of the University of Texas have to make the “Hook ‘em” gesture in the right way and they wave their hands in time with “The Eyes of Texas.” Paying to engaging in the ritual properly, may give people the sense that they are more in control of their behavior than if they are building something where the product matters more than the process. Further research needs to explore why rituals have some power to help people select options that benefit them in the long-run rather than those that benefit them in the short-term.