In fact, one point of consensus in the psychology of ritual is that rituals are a compensatory response to anxiety and perceived cues of uncertainty. In one famous example, the fisherman in Melanesia would perform elaborate rituals when in unpredictable and dangerous waters but did nothing when the water was calm. This may explain why some people may seem to spontaneously generate rituals before a stressful event without being entirely aware of why they’re doing so, like our sock ritual example. However, this raises the following question: if rituals are a response to anxiety or cues of uncertainty, how—if at all—do they reduce anxiety? This is precisely what Allison Wood Brooks and her colleagues set out to answer across several studies.

The Study and Findings

Study 1a: How do rituals influence performance in an anxiety-inducing public domain?

In their first study, researchers had participants sing Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing, in front of strangers. Clearly, it’s a public act that induces a great deal of anxiety in even the best amateur singers. The participants were assigned to either a ritual or non-ritual condition. For the participants in the ritual condition, the researchers first informed them of this anxiety-inducing task that they must do, and then asked to perform the following ritual in under a minute:

“Draw a picture of how you are feeling right now. Sprinkle salt on your drawing. Count up to five out loud. Crinkle up your paper. Throw your paper in the trash.”

Upon completing the ritual, they were brought to a karaoke machine and asked to sing Don’t Stop Believing for the experimenters. In the non-ritual condition, the participants were told about their task and to sit silently for one minute, before they continued with the rest of the experiment like the ritual condition. For both conditions, the experimenters measured the accuracy of each participant’s performance of the song, as well as their self-reported anxiety about the task once they were done singing.

The authors found that participants who were assigned to the ritual condition saw improved singing performance compared to the condition that did not perform the ritual, as well as lower self-reported anxiety. In fact, they found that this improvement was statistically explained by the decrease in participants’ anxiety. As a result, they found initial evidence that the enacting of a ritual before an anxiety-inducing performance led to improved task performance—specifically by means of decreasing anxiety. However, the researchers weren’t satisfied with just the subjective reports of their anxiety, so they ran the study again with a more objective marker of anxiety: heart-rate.

Study 1b: Heart pumping anxiety

Here, participants went through the same procedure as Study 1a, but with two key exceptions:

Participants’ heart rate was measured at two points: right after they were told that they’ll be doing a public singing task and right after they completed the singing task. The experimenters added a condition where participants actively tried to calm themselves down before having to sing—which they note is a common strategy people use prior to a stressful performance.

As in study one, participants’ anxiety before their performance—as measured by their heart rate—decreased only when they performed a ritual beforehand, which lead to improved performance compared to the conditions that had no ritual or tried to calm themselves down. Interestingly, they found that people who did nothing before their performance and those who actively tried to calm themselves saw no difference in anxiety levels before the performance. Overall, this pattern of results supports the idea that rituals improve one’s performance in a public, anxiety-inducing task by reducing one’s heart-rate and hence their anxiety.

Study 2: How do rituals impact performance in an anxiety-inducing private domain?

If the driver of these ritual effects on performance is that they mitigate anxiety, then rituals should only show this effect for tasks where anxiety is high and must be reduced in order to do well—but not when the task is perceived to be easy and less stressful. This was tested in the authors’ second study.

In this experiment, participants were given a set of math tests and told that the test would be fairly easy, or difficult and stressful. In the low anxiety condition, participants were told that they would complete a series of eight fun math puzzles, in which they could earn $.50 for each question they answered correctly. They would then either perform the same ritual seen in Study 1a or just wait quietly and then perform the arithmetic tasks.

In the high anxiety condition, participants were told that they would complete a very difficult IQ test made up of eight questions under time pressure. For each question, they would have five seconds to select the correct answer, and that they and their peers would receive feedback about their accuracy after each question. For every question that they answer correctly, they’d get $4. For each question answered incorrectly, they’d lose fifty cents. Then, participants were placed in either a ritual or non-ritual condition and then were measured on their performance on the math test.

The researchers found that performing a ritual before the high-anxiety math task helped improve performance on the test, but not when participants wrote the low-anxiety version of the test. Given this, they argue that rituals are capable of improving one’s performance on both public and private-domain tasks that are anxiety-inducing—but not when the task at hand is seen as being easy. There is, it seems, a time and place for a ritual to be done.

Study 3: Rituals—don’t stop believing!

In study three, the researchers wanted to test whether the decreased anxiety was the result of rituals themselves or from the emotional expression linked with the ritual. They replaced the step in the ritual of throwing out the paper with counting up to 10 and back. They also wanted to see if describing the ritual as a ritual, or a series of random behaviors would affect the pattern of results.

They ran three conditions that all completed a high-anxiety math test. The participants in the ritual condition were asked to perform the new ritual before the task, with the experimenter stressing the ritualistic nature of the moves. In the random behavior condition, the participants performed the exact same ritual but were told that these actions were “random” and being used as stimuli in another study. In the control, participants simply waited before their math test. They were all measured on their performance on the math test afterwards.

The researchers found that merely referring to a set of behaviors as a ritual led to improved performance on the math test, compared to that same behavior being called random. Thus, taking out the symbolic element of a ritual has a significant effect on the ability of rituals to reduce pre-performance anxiety and improve performance.

Summary of the Results

Across their studies, Wood Brooks and her colleagues found:

Performing a ritual before a high-anxiety performance helps to reduce performance anxiety and thereby improves one’s overall performance. So, while the rituals were not directly related to the task at hand, they are indirectly related to it, by helping to reduce one’s anxiety and thereby improving performance. This effect of seeing improved performance as a result of enacting a ritual only occurred when the task was perceived as anxiety-inducing; when the task was simple and framed as being easy, there was no significant effect of improving performance. In order to see the effect of anxiety-reduction in these high anxiety tasks, one needed to believe that what they were doing was indeed a ritual—and not a series of random behaviors.

Results Applied

Applying pre-performance rituals to your life: Rituals as a meaning-making game

Everyone has a handful of stressful tasks that requires them to “perform.” Since cultivating new habits is often a slow and arduous task, it may help to make incorporating pre-performance rituals into our lives more interesting. Thus, you may want to try the following: First, pick a stressful, anxiety-inducing performance you currently face. Then, try to recall if there is anything that you will characteristically do before that high-stakes performance that is instrumentally unrelated to it—e.g., stirring your coffee clockwise three times in a row and before stirring it once counterclockwise. You can let those sequenced actions be the “fixed, characteristic behaviors” that lay the foundation of your ritual.