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Key points
- Rituals are found the world over—and there might be a psychological reason.
- Increasing cognitive load through ritualized behavior may decrease anxiety.
- Engaging in repetitive behaviors may similarly decrease anxiety.
Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, as do the customs and social institutions we create around us. However, as varied as people and cultures are, some aspects of culture are similar around the world.
One of these remarkable cultural similarities is the creation of rituals—sequences of actions and speech that are performed in a very particular order and according to a specific set of rules. Across the world, humans use rituals to mark important events like the coming of age of young people, sometimes with a religious ceremony like the bar/bat mitzvah or confirmation, sometimes with family celebrations like the quinceanera or a "sweet 16" party. We ritualize events like weddings and holidays and funerals, and we sometimes develop our own family rituals, like revisiting the same campground by the lake every year or eating a special food on Christmas morning.
A question that has intrigued researchers in anthropology, sociology, and psychology has been why we are so persistent and so consistent in developing rituals in our lives. What exactly are the benefits of engaging in ritualized behavior?
The Benefits of Ritualized Behavior
Our ritualized behaviors are, by definition, repetitious, and often rigid, with little variability in the way we perform them. In addition to celebrations and major events, stress can trigger ritualized behaviors, which has led to the hypothesis that ritualized behaviors might serve to reduce anxiety—to act as an anxiolytic.
Boyer and Liénard (2006) proposed that the repetitious and rigid behaviors characteristic of rituals act to reduce anxiety because they increase what psychologists call cognitive load. Cognitive load refers to the cognitive resources we have available to us to solve whatever problem is facing us. Rituals increase our cognitive load, overloading our working memory and reducing the attention available for processing anxiety. As a result, anxiety is suppressed because there isn’t enough cognitive capacity to go around.
In a 2018 study, researchers Johannes Karl and Ronald Fischer set out to test this hypothesis in a carefully controlled laboratory experiment. They started with the premise that anxiety has at least two major components: cognitive anxiety (also known as anxious apprehension) and physiological arousal. Karl and Fischer wanted to examine the effects of ritual on both components in a laboratory setting.
To do so, they tested 180 undergraduates in either stress or control conditions. Stress was created using a modification of the Trier Social Stress test—participants were asked to count backward from 1,033 by increments of 13. Errors meant starting again and they were reminded to count faster every 60 seconds.
Members of both groups were then assigned to one of five groups. One group experienced cognitive load—they were asked to memorize a poem and then recite it (errors once again meant starting over). A second group was asked to clean an object using any method they preferred (the “undirected movement” group).
A third group, meanwhile, was asked to clean the object using any method while they were memorizing and reciting the poem and a fourth was asked to clean the object using a brand-new ritual invented just for this experiment. This ritual involved a script that detailed how they were supposed to clean the object they had been given, complete with instructions on the precise motions to be used, instructions to verbally count these motions aloud, and a special cleaning cloth.
The fifth, control group, either rested or looked at low valence, low arousal images. Physiological arousal (heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and respiration) was assessed for all groups as were feelings of anxiety, worry, and mood.
What they found was that stress increased the repetitiveness and rigidity of behavior, which in turn also decreased measures of physiological arousal.
What they did not find was support for the idea that increasing the demands on cognitive capacity and swamping the working memory systems had any effect on anxiety. Neither the physiological arousal anxiety creates, nor anxious apprehension, were affected by manipulating cognitive load.
This is interesting given that many studies have found support for the cognitive load hypothesis. These authors speculate that their cognitive load task may have been just as stressful as their stress task, making it difficult to see the effects of cognitive load.
However, it was interesting to see that all those motor tics we engage in when we’re stressed—like finger-tapping or bouncing a foot on your knee—may actually help us feel less anxious.
References
Karl, J.A., and Fischer, R. (2018). Rituals, Repetitiveness and Cognitive Load: A Competitive Test of Ritual Benefits for Stress. Human Nature, 29, 418–441.
