Speaking of Psychology - COVID-19 and the Loss of Rituals, Formation of New Ones with Michael Norton, PhD

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

The coronavirus is keeping us from experiencing some of the deepest and most meaningful rituals of our lives, from graduations to weddings to funerals. What is this doing to us psychologically? How important are rituals to our mental health and well-being? Dr. Michael I. Norton, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, talks about the many rituals he has studied and their roles within our lives. Episode Links APA COVID-19 Information and Resources Michael I. Norton, PhD Join us online August 6-8 for APA 2020 Virtual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Almost daily, the news is full of stories of high school and college seniors missing out on their graduation ceremonies and of people being unable to see and touch their loved ones who are suffering from COVID-19. Some of the more heartbreaking accounts feature families having to bury loved ones without funerals or formal mourning. The coronavirus is keeping us from experiencing some of the deepest and most meaningful rituals of our lives. What is this doing to us psychologically? How important are rituals to our mental health and well-being? What new rituals might we be creating? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that explores the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Michael I. Norton, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, and a member of Harvard's Behavioral Insights Group. His research covers a gamut of fascinating topics from money to daydreaming, from greed to deception.

But I asked him here today to talk primarily about rituals in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Welcome to speaking of psychology, Dr. Norton. Thank you so much for inviting me. I think we probably all have an idea of what rituals are, but it always helps to have a common language. Is it, for example, a ritual to take a coffee break every day at 1015, or is that just a habit? What are the differences between rituals and habits? Could you define for our listeners what constitutes a ritual? There certainly lie on a continuum.

So there are a lot of habits that have some ritualistic elements. And there are a lot of rituals that, of course, look a lot like habits. So it's hard to differentiate them into pure, that's purely a habit and that's purely a ritual. But one way to think about that continuum is, if I ask you in the morning, do you first brush your teeth and then take a shower? or do you first take a shower and then brush your teeth? Crazily, when I asked that question, in countries all over the world, actually, about 50% of people do it one way and 50% of people do it the other way. So they have this thing they do every morning,

and they really think their way is the good way and the other way is the bad way. Now then if I ask, imagine in your head, and you can do this yourself, imagine in your head doing them in the opposite order tomorrow morning, like really simulate that you would, instead of brushing your teeth first, you'd get in the shower first. When I ask people that, a lot of people make a face, like I don't like that. That feels weird to me or that feels wrong to me. But a lot of people say, no problem at all, I'm happy to switch the order.

You can see in there sort of the difference between a habit and a ritual. So if you like to do things a certain way, but then if I say switch it, you don't mind. It's more like a habit. In the morning, you need to brush your teeth, need to take a shower. You have a habit of doing that. The order doesn't really matter. But if you're one of those people who felt a little weird when you thought about doing it differently, now that's a little bit further down the continuum toward a ritual because now the order in which you do things really matters to you. When it really shouldn't matter necessarily, it feels like it matters.

And that means that it's a little bit more important to you. So rituals seem to be ubiquitous. I mean, I can't think of a culture or a time in history when humans did not engage in rituals. They can seem trivial, like buying a weekly lottery ticket, or they can be really profound, like a funeral mass. So my question is, are we physically hardwired to perform rituals? What does the science tell us about where this drive comes from? One of the interesting things about studying rituals is, of course, that many different disciplines have tackled the topic. I'm certainly not the first person to start studying rituals.

So if you look in anthropology and sociology, of course, in clinical psychology, which I hope we'll talk about as well, people have been looking at what rituals are and how ubiquitous they are. And in fact, if you think about how we identify that some humans had some culture way back when, we often look to see if they buried their dead in a ceremonious fashion or not. So if they don't, then we say maybe they didn't have culture in a sense. But when there's shells around the body, we use that to say they must have felt differently about death. They must have had beliefs about death. They must have wanted to honor that person as a group.

So rituals, in a way, are one of the ways we identify when humans became human. So sheltering in place and needing to keep at least six feet away from most other people are actions that have radically altered our lives and prevented us from doing so many things. What's the long-term impact of missing out on some of the rituals I mentioned earlier, especially not being able to fully grieve loved ones we've lost to the coronavirus? I think our research would suggest that there is good news and bad news. So one of the first projects that we did on rituals I did with my colleague Francesca Gino on grieving rituals. And one of the things we saw is we sort of thought we would be studying grief in terms of the public communal rituals.

We all think of often religious rituals as well. But when we asked people, you know, think of someone who you love to have passed away. and we asked them just, what did you do after that? Many people wrote something like, there was a funeral, but then they would write something very private that they did just for that person just by themselves that often no one else even knew about. One of the examples that always stays with me

is an older woman whose husband had passed away, and she wrote, I washed his car every week as he used to. Now, that's clearly not an established public ritual that's thousands of years old. Cars don't even exist until fairly recently. So we know that that woman made that ritual up herself. But as you listen to it, you can see how meaningful and important it was to her. And what we find in our research, and this is the good news, is that even those private ones that we make up ourselves, those are associated with less grief and better coping.

Now, that's not to say that the communal ones aren't incredibly important because we need social support. We need all kinds of things to get through grief. And that's the bad news, that losing those really does have an impact. The good news is we can have a little bit of flexibility in creating our own, and those can help too. One of the rituals that you've studied is the simple handshake. That's something else that we can't engage in right now. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci has suggested maybe facetiously that we may never shake hands again. Do you think that's the case?

And can you talk about some of the types of communication that are inherent in handshaking, why it's so important? In research that was led by Juliana Schroger, who's at Berkeley, We tried to look to see what really handshakes are all about. In fact, I think it's apocryphal, unfortunately, but there is a story that the reason handshakes began way back when is because by shaking hands, you would dislodge any daggers from your sleeves and they would fall on the ground.

So you would know you can trust the person. That's probably not true, but if you think about the psychological element there, it's really showing that you can trust me, that we can be close enough to each other to touch and nobody's going to get killed, so handshakes are a sign of trust. Now, that's exactly what we see in our research, actually, is that when people shake hands,

they tend to trust each other more. The reason is that by shaking hands, I'm signaling that I care about you and that you can trust me back. That's the bad news, because as you said, we can't shake hands right now, and who knows if we'll get back to that ritual. But the good news is that it's not really the handshake itself that matters. It's the ability to communicate that you care about someone else and that you trust them. And we ran a study, and this is years ago before the current crisis, where we had someone refused to shake hands with somebody else.

And in general, people think the person's a jerk. But if the person says, hey, the reason I'm not shaking your hand is because I've had a cold. Well, now suddenly the person who shakes hands is a jerk because they're giving you a cold. And the person who doesn't, by not shaking your hand is showing they care about you and they can trust you. So again, I think we have, even though handshakes are so ubiquitous, we do have some flexibility and how we try to accomplish the goal that handshakes were doing. And again, we can be a little bit freelancing on to figure out how we can actually signal those things.

Quite a few athletes engage in some peculiar behaviors during or before games. For example, you noted in an article in Scientific American that Wade Boggs, the former third baseman for the Boston Red Sox, woke up exactly at the same time each day, ate chicken before each game, took precisely 117 ground balls in practice, took batting practice at 517, and ran sprints at 717. Is that kind of behavior a little crazy, or does it serve an important purpose? One of my favorite things about, I'm from Boston, Wade Boggs played for the Boston Red Sox. He also used to, when he, at every bat, he would write the Hebrew word for life in the dirt. And the best part of that is that he wasn't Jewish.

So he just decided that he would adopt something from another religion. legend that seemed to be pretty good and then bring it into his his performance. Yeah, we do see these performance rituals that are so ubiquitous. And when athletes do them, they can be incredibly elaborate. And we think they're a little unusual, but we don't, we don't really think it's a problem. So Raphael Madaal is a very elaborate preserved ritual that he does every time. And if you ask these players, why do you do it? They'll say it's a ritual and it helps me perform better. So they're doing it on purpose to try to accomplish this goal. Sometimes I think if I did one of those crazy rituals, like before I taught a class, I'd be fired because nobody thinks that teaching is as hard as playing tennis.

So we have context-specific rituals that we're allowed to do and not allowed to do. But even for mundane things like people like us who aren't, you know, playing professional sports, but we have to teach or lead a meeting or give a presentation that we're worried about. Alison Woodbrooks, another colleague of mine at HBS, led this project on do rituals help calm us down in those situations? And the answer is that they do, actually. So when we're feeling anxious, the worst thing to do is tell yourself to calm down. And by the way, that's the most important takeaway. Maybe the whole thing is never try to tell yourself just to calm down.

We just can't do it. But doing a little ritual before we perform actually can calm us down a little bit and then help us perform a little bit better. I've seen videos that you've done on the Internet where you have people do these rituals to demonstrate group cohesion. And so I think you have found that they do that. But on the other hand, people who are excluded from those rituals become an outgroup because they are excluded from the rituals. I mean, it's just sort of a peculiar thing that we tend to do even without thinking. And you talk about group cohesion and the importance of rituals, what they do for the people who are in the groups and how they maybe harm the people who are out. Yeah, this is one of the paradoxes of rituals is that they're not just.

good. And of course, we know that because rituals taken too far can become a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder, which we know isn't good. So we know that it's not just that more rituals is better. And I would never want anyone to think that what I'm saying is more rituals is better. They have to be used when it's appropriate. But another way that they're not good for us as well is you're absolutely right. They bond us together. But in the bonding us together, they can drive us apart from other people. When I talk about this, I do have people stand up and perform a ritual in groups, and I made it up. And I just, and I say, here's something I made up. Can we all do it together? And it's things like clapping and stomping your hands and things like that. And all I say to

the group is, go ahead. And what happens is people start the ritual and they very quickly get in sync so that everyone starts clapping at the same time and then stomping at the same time. And they really like it. They feel good about each other. They're looking around smile. It's like, this is our ritual. It's great. But you also see that if someone, quote, unquote, messes up, meaning that I clap instead of stomp at the wrong time, people get very angry at the person. So they look at them, you know, what's wrong with you? And when I asked them at the end, what did you think about those people? They say, well, you know, he was doing it wrong. Now, remember, I told them I just made up this ritual that they've never done before. There's no wrong. There's no wrong. There's no right. I just made it up. I told them I just made it up. And yet immediately, that quickly we can say, this is the good way, we do it this way, and if you do it the other way, I don't like you. And we do see that in two separate projects. So with Tammy Kim, we showed that rituals can bond us together. And with Nick Thompson, we showed actually that rituals can drive us apart in exactly this way. So let's talk for a minute about rituals and clothing.

A lot of us have spent the last couple, almost two months in sweatpants or pajamas most of the day. And a popular meme on social media asks, when was the last time you wore pants? with buttons. So I think we know that clothing has meaning in pretty much every culture. What are some of the actual rituals surrounding clothing and how do they affect us psychologically? One of the very first things we did when we started studying rituals was we asked research assistants to find every grieving ritual that any human group had ever enacted in human history. So that was their task and we set them loose. And pretty much every recorded culture has a grieving ritual. It's something that often has communal elements. And we know this. Whatever culture you're in, you know exactly the one in your

culture. One of the things that we found in that research is color plays an extremely important role in grieving, but it's not very consistent from culture to culture. So many, many cultures, of course, have black as the color associated with grief. You wear black to the funeral etc. Other colors, though, have white. That's the color that is associated with grief. If you wore black to that funeral, people would be furious at you. If you wore white to a funeral where black is the appropriate color, those people would be furious at you. There's other cultures where red or green are associated with grief as well. So it's really interesting to me in this way because it's clear that people want to use color to help cope with their grief and they use the color of their

clothing in particular, but then there's a little bit of flexibility on exactly which color you end up using. I think the good thing about wearing colors that we've really lost is that we used to be able to signal to other people where we were in our process of grief. When people wore black for a year, for example, you would know that they'd lost someone, and that might help you support them. Now, of course, many cultures have gotten rid of those grieving rituals. So when I meet someone, I don't know if they've lost a loved one yesterday or a year before or never. So it changes my ability to support them. The plus side is, of course, now not everyone knows my business and I might be a private person.

So there's these tradeoffs between giving up rituals to get us some things, but we also often lose some things along the way. Are there still some cultures where you have to wear a color for, say, a year? I know in my family, which was Italian, which is Italian, that you were supposed to wear black for a year if you were a widow. Is that still prevalent? Some cultures do. Actually, speaking of professional sports, you'll see sports teams often wear a black armband for a season if someone important to the sports franchise passes away. So we still see people using clothing in order to signal something important.

But the variability from culture to culture, and even within culture and subculture, is very wide in terms of exactly what people do to show that they're grieving over time. Something else a lot of us are also experiencing during our physical distancing is not being able to get our haircut or doing it ourselves or having someone we live with do the job. When does caring for our hair move from being just a habit, I get my haircut every month, or an actual ritual? We, this is a hard one for me to answer because I'm bald. I don't have a lot of these. Sadly, I don't have this problem. But even here we see, even speaking just within grief again, there we see again that people often do something with.

with hair when they're grieving, but it varies extremely widely again from culture to culture. So in some cultures, you shade your head when someone passes away. In other cultures, you grow your beard when someone passes away. In other cultures, you take a snippet of the person's hair and keep it like in a locket to honor them. So even within the domain of specifically hair, again, it seems like just with color, it seems like people want to do something to honor that loss. they look around for what's available. It might be clothing.

It might be their own bodies. And then they do something in order to try to enact a ritual to help them and to help others cope with that loss. Another obsession for some of us during the pandemic lockdown is food. We're cooking at home more. A lot of people are baking. We're starting sourdough starters, which brings to mind food rituals. And I know you've also looked at those. I'm wondering about some rituals such as.

as saying grace before dinner or having a sommelier go through a whole elaborate ceremony and pouring wine, does this make food somehow better for us? Bizarrely enough, it seems to. So in research led by Kathleen Voss, we actually look to see does performing rituals around food actually make the food taste better? Should it taste better? Probably not. The way you prepare something doesn't necessarily mean it will taste better. but when people prepare prepare and consume food ritualistically, we can show that they actually enjoy the experience more. Very simplest one is we gave people free chocolate. And some people we just said, go ahead and eat it. And other people we said things like first break it in half, then unwrap that half, then

eat that half, then unwrote the other half, you know, not very complicated, but still an orderly progression through eating the chocolate, a little bit ritualistic. And we find that people like eating the chocolate more. in part because when you do a ritual around food, it immerses you much more in the experience. So think typically about eating food. You might be on your phone. You might be watching TV. You might be distracted.

You're not really engaged in the consumption act. Rituals seem to bring us into the act so that we end up savoring the food more. We're literally leaving the chocolate in our mouth longer and enjoying it more because it's sort of focused our attention on what we're doing. Are there any rituals you would recommend that our listeners engage in right now so that they can feel more in control and less stressed? In a project that we have just started since this crisis, my student Jimenez-Garcia Rada is leading this. We've surveyed parents and asked them about Jimenez-studies decision-making in couples, which is a fascinating topic in its own right. But we've looked to see what's happened to parenting during the crisis because almost everyone's parenting has changed. in very different ways, but there's been changed. So we asked people, very simple question,

have you created any new rituals as a parent with your kids since the crisis began? A huge number of people have, I think 50 to 60 percent say that they have. And those parents tend to feel a little better about their parenting, and they're a little bit happier with their lives in general. Now, it's obviously possible that people who are happy with their parenting have the time to create rituals. So we don't know the causal direction in this case. But it does seem as though when the world, it gives us uncertainty, we tend to look to rituals as a way to cope with the uncertainty. So parents are doing rituals around hand washing. They're doing rituals around wearing masks. They're helping their kids through the process of learning how to do that. Just like the way we do at bedtime or at meal time with

our kids where you have to have this particular bunny and then this story and then we sit over there Mommy comes in. You know, I have this whole elaborate thing for kids that we do all the time. Parents use rituals like crazy. Then for some reason we think when we're grown up, well, those are silly. We don't need them. Well, maybe if they work for kids, they might work for us, too. So we're going to be singing happy birthday as we wash our hands for the rest of our lives, right? I bet people, it's almost like an earworm. I bet people will have it way more in their head now as they're washing than they ever did before. Well, Dr. Norton, thank you so much for joining. Speaking of psychology. This has been really interesting, and I hope our listeners have learned a lot from

hearing about your research. Thank you so much. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning into our podcast. This is one of the series we have produced regarding psychology's role in helping us understand and navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. You can find other resources and tipsheets about coping through the pandemic on our website at APA.org. You can also find previous episodes of speaking of psychology on Apple, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. All episodes are available on our website at www. www.spicingof psychology.org. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, email us at speaking of psychology

at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.