Michael Norton (on rituals)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather, and I'm joined by the Minister of Mayhem.

That's a new one.

Try it on, see if you can get into a little trouble.

You know what it sounds?

Capital t trouble.

It sounds like screamo.

Sure, or yeah, some kind of a metal collective.

Exactly not really my style.

No, and not on topic either. For our guests, any which way?

Well, that's not true.

Okay, thanks for correcting me.

Because there's a lot of rituals that happen at these screamo concerts, true, true, true, true, everyone screams at the same time. I imagine, I mean, I've never been to one, but.

Michael Norton is a well first, he's our guest today, and Michael is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School. He has a previous book, Everyone Loved Happy Money The Science of Happier Spending. He's also written a lot. And we talk about it on Humble Bragging, which I think is lovely.

Yeah, it was fun.

It's a fun topic, but he has a new book out right now, called The Ritual Effect From Habit to Ritual Harness the surprising power of Everyday actions. And what's really fun about this episode is, I think, like us, many people enter it thinking they don't have any rituals.

And we all do.

And we do.

This is also the answer to an easter egg we were talking about on some fact check about teeth brushing and order of things.

And some people actually in the comments sounded off that they totally disagreed with me and that they agreed with me. A lot of people were like, you like tooth brushing in the middle of the skincare routine?

Is sacrilege bad, bad, bad, bad.

And then other people were like, I do the same thing, although I let my serum set in.

Really, and they're not worried that the toothpaste is gonna get into the serum and make a sludge.

Apparently not. Wow, oh, this isn't the place for it. But I didn't do it in the fact check, and we already did the fact check. But I felt obligated to explain the full situation. Because while we were interviewing Amy Poehler, I had mentioned that Righteous Gemstones had reached out and that I wanted to do it, yes.

Okay.

So I just want to be very clear, right? Come next season when you don't see me. Don't think I got high on the hog, I would have been there in a second.

Right, okay.

I think just maybe not a place for it. The intro, but here we are.

That's fine, I just think timing didn't work out.

It wasn't on my side. Yeah, all right, please enjoy Michael Norton. He's an object spitter.

He's an object spitter.

He's an object spitter.

How are you doing, hi, Dax?

Nice to meet you. So sorry, I'm late. Have you been offered all the beverages?

I have thank you, okay, great.

You have the famous cream top. I was talking to someone yesterday and they said that they like Maru.

We need to ask, or do you know, for sure? I make the jokes, see you tomorrow.

Did you make jokes like that before you were a dad?

Or did you-?

Mine? Yeah, mine have gotten a lot worse.

He's a pun master.

Well, and we can talk about this. It kind of dovetails into your research. He is increasingly having impulse control issues with his puns. Compulsion has perhaps entered the chat.

I did a dad joke the other day, and my daughter's eight, I said the joke and she went.

Burn, burn, Oh, that's good, that's what they're there for those children.

To humble the shit out of you completely. Do you have more than one? Just one? And you were smart, You were like, this is a lot of work.

One and done, she's right.

Because zero to one is a completely different life, but then one to two is just more of a thing.

Yeah, someone said wisely. It's not twice as much, it's exponential, the second one's like four times as much.

Well, my brother's eight years younger than me, so we're not ruling it out for you.

You never know, we don't know anything about you.

We don't know about your vasectomy or not. We're not gonna ask, we're not gonna start there, I'll start.

I had one, I sent all the paperwork. Did you not see the paperwork?

How old are you?

49.

Me too, Oh my God, 1975?.

What's your birthday?

April 17th.

January 2nd. So I am your elder, I want you to treat me as such.

I shall obeisance.

Is that how you say that word?

Where are you from?

From outside Boston, I'm Irish Catholic, there's only like two places you can live.

I have to ask.

Yeah, go ahead.

Because you're of the appropriate age.

A little young, but yeah.

Do you know my boyfriends Ben and Matt?

No.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

No, I know who you mean. Okay, good, believe me, I know who you mean.

But you don't know them? No, I don't.

He went to a competing college, he went to Princeton, right? Princeton.

Oh, ouch.

Yeah, but he now teaches where they went to school.

Which is much more impressive than going there, I agree.

I don't think so because I didn't get in, so oh shit.

Did you take a certain joy in becoming a faculty member there?

Every grievance you've had, you just visit it on the you know what? I mean, it's so fun, it's so fun.

You can resent all these incoming freshmen, so you grew up outside of Boston, like, how far out?

45 minutes such that we never, ever went into the city once a year. It was kind of a big thing. But otherwise, we just lived on a block that was a circle and we would just kind of bike and walk in a circle all year in the suburbs.

And what did mom and dad do?

They owned a hallmark store, actually.

Oh my goodness.

That's very novel, which was very, very interesting as a kid, a lot of gift stuff in my blood. I used to work security.

Oh, at the hallmark.

Yeah, because this is a surprising thing, people really like to steal cards. Yeah, of course.

Oh, I could see that.

Because they're so easy, I mean, they're flat, put them anywhere.

And also nobody wants to pay for a greeting card, it sucks to buy a greeting card.

Exactly.

Well, when you know, you damn well could have made one out of paper at home, that's right now. Was most of your concentration on the employees? Because we had a prompt for one of our shows, and it was tell us about a time, what was, oh, mall stories, mall stories? And we had two people that had worked at greeting card stores and one of them had just robbed the place blind.

Can we follow up with them and see if they worked at my parents store?

Because is there a way to recoup? She did want to stay anonymous.

Ask if it was the Dedham Mall in Massachusetts, and then we'll know.

Well, that's kind of exciting that mom and dad had a store at the mall.

It was interesting. I'm the youngest of five, so most of us at some point cycled through working at the store.

Now, when you're in high school, you probably want to be working at the gap or merry-go-round.

A shoe store?

No, it's really cool, actually, to work at a card store, in a mall, everybody's like, that guy's cool.

He's security.

We should hang out with him.

I'd ask his number, but I'm sure it's already taken. What kind of guy were you in high school?

I would say a nerd.

Your four older siblings were they boys, girls?

Brother, three girls, and then I'm the youngest. Oh, okay, I was, according to everyone except my mother, an accident, okay?

She's still keeping strong.

She'll never go there.

And were the sisters in school with you at the same time?

One was.

And was she protective and helpful, or did she distance herself from you?

She's four years older than me, so she wasn't as cool and so she was nice. But not Let's hang, which I completely understand.

And what was your BA in?

Psychology and English, which my father said. I don't know which one of those is more useless.

Minimally, you could have gone into law with your English degree.

I was thinking about being a lawyer, and then I worked at a law firm as a paralegal. I was applying to law school and to P.h.D. programs and this lawyer there. I said, Will you write me a recommendation letter? and he said, I will write you a recommendation letter. If you promise me that you will never become a lawyer, sure?

Wow.

Because lawyers hate being lawyers.

He hated it.

As soon as you become friends with a few lawyers, you realize the entire field hates their job, maybe more than any other field.

It was amazing, he had a great job, but he just was really miserable. He was like, work all the time on hard, sad things.

Yeah, and it's all about hours, it's billable hours, right? so you're just a slave to the hours, okay, so why psychology?

I believe that as the youngest of five, you're automatically an observer of kind of the chaos. Large families are a lot going on. Actually. I was talking to my sister about this, so we have seven, obviously with my two parents. So, the number of possible permutations of coalitions.

And you have the least amount of power and control in the dynamics, so you're probably the most incentivized to figure out why it works the way it does.

Completely. How can I get somebody to drive me to where I need to go?

Right, and the parents have stopped parenting probably two kids ago. It's a miracle you did good in school and stuff. It really just must have been an innate drive.

If things went wrong, they would show up, otherwise it was. If we don't hear anything, let's just let him do his thing.

Yeah, let's not fix what's not broken, the wheel's not squeaking. Then, even when applying to graduate school, what tips you to psychology? Other than the lawyer saying This isn't for you, it's not for anyone?

My randomly assigned freshman year college roommate is still one of my best friends, and he's smarter than me. He was one of those people, even in college, he had it figured out.

He was probably the firstborn.

Yeah, oldest of three, totally. And he applied to P.h.D. programs in psychology, and I was like, I don't know what I want to do, so I applied also.

And then what was the Master's in?

Also psychology.

So once you get into your P.h.D. program, you're imagining a much more specific thread of psychology. And what was that?

Social psychology, which used to be the study of groups, but it ends up being really just how people think. That was just really fascinating for me. What's going on in social interactions, but also just full stop, what's going on with the humans.

Yeah, because throwing social in there makes me confused, like, are we talking about a hybrid of sociology and psychology?

Kind of, yeah, far from clinical, I'd think I would be very bad as a therapist, and so it was more the academic side.

And did you want to run experiments?

Oh my God, I did. It's very fun to design experiments and see how people react, that's just the most fun thing in the world.

Yeah, what was one you did in your doctoral pursuit?

We created a game, you know, the guess who game, yes, where you're like, do they have a hat on? that kind of thing? you flip them down? We were studying racism at the time, and we made a version of that. Where we made new faces for the game. And we varied the age and the race and the gender of the people in the game.

You're kidding, they avoided it completely.

And we did it so you made money if you won the game and people were like, I'm good. I don't think I need to say that.

Well, I'm also thinking of a lot of kind of ancillary or contributing factors. One is they know they're being observed, right? So if they're at home playing with their wife, they would have said, Are they black? So that's interesting. And then also where in the country you are is relevant.

It reminds me we did one where the person you played with was either black or white, and they either went first or second. And what happens is if you're playing with a black partner and they ask about race, then when you go you ask about it because they've shown that it's okay to ask.

But they gotta go first.

But if I'm playing with you and you ask about race, I still am like, I'm still gonna stay away from it.

Yeah, it's like, getting permission from the minority group completely, that's so interesting.

What can bleed out of that like once you discover that?

This was with grownups, we did this to see those dynamics, but then we did a version with little kids. And one thing we can do then is we can see, at what age do kids start to realize that they maybe shouldn't say this, yes?

Do they not have to apply as much sunblock in the summertime?

I'm surprised, though, that they don't even say I get the inclination to not straight up say, are they black? I'm surprised they don't say are they white? Because that feels less scary. Maybe just people aren't good at playing.

But then you've gotten rid of all the Black players, then you feel guilty about that.

But it's still a way. No, it's just the way to figure that out without calling out the minority, it's actually calling out the majority. I'm just surprised, I guess that wasn't even on the table.

Completely.

It's funny, I noticed my 11-year-old has a lot of interesting things. So, like, we were just at a restaurant and I didn't see the child. But, she said, as this little girl left the dining room at the hotel, Oh, did you see that little girl? That's going to swifty? And I go, No, and she goes, Yes, beautiful girl. And I was like, This is so weird.

She's saying.

I'll spare you all the many steps before. It was a girl with like a shaved head from going through cancer treatment, clearly, and she was in a wheelchair. And my daughter was being so kind, but it was funny how she just kind of instinctually or innately decided.

Right?

She was rooting for her, she wanted to say how beautiful she looked.

Oh, it's sweet, but I know what you mean, it's really.

Opaque.

Beating around the bushes to what she really wants to ask or talk about? Probably yes.

And then some other weird cultural pressure, too. I think the most honest thing would be like, I saw a little girl and I'm so sad she has cancer. I'm glad she's at this Taylor Swift concert.

I'm glad she's having fun.

Yeah, but there's something about just saying, I saw this, it was sad. I feel bad that for some reason, you're not supposed to say, but you could.

It kind of focuses the thing on you and your feelings about things, rather than you know the other person.

We just had an experience. This is a total brag, I'm going to virtue signal, and you wrote about humble bragging.

And you just bragged about your daughter, so you mean, this is another brag? Sure, it's a double brag. Okay, I'm just checking where we are.

How many were the B? I guess, is what I need to know.

People usually respond well to genuine curiosity, exactly.

You can read Intention and these two kids, they just have real questions.

Humble bragging How did you end up? No, no, that's too far ahead. How do you end up at a business school? You have this in common with Adam Grant, right?

That seems like they just hire bald, white men.

Okay, just me and Adam Grant.

I got a P.h.D. in psychology, the normal thing would be to go and be a psychology professor. I was not super interested in that for various reasons. And I quit academia after I got my P.h.D. for a little bit, then found that I was completely unemployable with a P.h.D. in psychology, right?

Wow.

And it was from Harvard Business School, and so people are like, Well, why did you choose Harvard Business School? And I'm like, that was it? I was either unemployed, so I wasn't like I got to go to a business school.

Well, it really shatters my fantasy of how Harvard's selecting people. My thought is like they have 6,000 applicants. Every professor in the country wants to work there. And then they sift through and whittle it down. But no, they grabbed you.

That's fascinating. I've asked the people who hired me and they're not sure what happened.

Yeah, they don't know either.

I mean, they like me now, but they go. What process were we using? Where this guy I was in the marketing group, they're like, he doesn't know anything about marketing at all, which is true to this day.

Now, one thing that seems kind of new, tell me the history. It does seem that, as corporations have got more and more methodical, I guess you have, like, Welch, what's his name, the old Ge?

Jack Welch.

He's applying like a system that's really, really fleshed out and thoughtful. And I imagine they're starting to think of new ways to get more out of businesses and obviously culture starts to become something they think about. And then at that point, I guess it's the gateway to let's invite psychology into this. What is the history of that?

Exactly always. Companies have brought in social scientists very broadly. But I think the testing and experimentation that really became huge in the 90s, but really even more of the 2000s. Business schools and companies thought we should get some people who do that because we can learn things from them.

Their incentive at that point is they might be able to select in the interview process through a personality test, something that could reap rewards. There's all kinds of ways.

Designing product, services, advertising for customers. Testing is really, really great, because rather than just put an ad out, you make four and you test them. And then you say, Oh, that's the one that works, let's use that one and save a lot of money. So it really became, in many companies, a culture of experimentation and the internet, which I'm not sure if you've heard of, but the internet allows experiments at huge scale.

Yeah, I remember hearing an NPR or some podcast talking about how Facebook had originally, when you wanted to ask for a photo to be taken down that you were in. It had a dropdown menu and it said, It's not me. There's all these things, one of them, I'm embarrassed.

Amazing.

And no one ever checked it. And then there was other and they would write in there. It's embarrassing, and they figured out that if they change it from I'm embarrassed to. It's objectively embarrassing that all of a sudden people click that, so that's like a social experiment.

And someone had to have that insight to make the change right.

Right, that this word. And then they could probably reverse engineer all these other things they had had.

Yeah, people don't like to say they're a type of person.

And it's vulnerable to say I'm embarrassed, to say it's embarrassing is not.

Yeah, that's just the facts. The facts are, that's an embarrassing photo.

Any reasonable person would say it.

Okay, so what particular skill of yours that you picked up in psychology did you bring this history of running lots of experiments?

Yeah, the projects that we do are all over the place. In a sense, there's some themes to them, but we really look at all sorts of different stuff. Which is why the job is super fun, actually. But the real thing was trying to cultivate observing the humans. That's the skill that people like me have. Where you can look at what people are doing and get something out of it that somebody else wouldn't notice.

Okay, so let's be very frank, how confident are you, though, that our social science experiments are really yielding much? I've become more and more skeptical over the years, to be honest.

In some domains, they have a big impact, and in other domains, they might not move the needle that much. For me, what's interesting is the learning from them. In my lab, I train my students to look at the humans as though you're an alien. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right, feel free to add this, we have the same analogy. Monica and I talk all the time about the aliens, but we always say the aliens are watching the monkeys. Because if you even start calling us monkeys, it gets even more objective.

Mine was I live right next to the Charles River, between Cambridge and Boston, at a certain day every year, usually in March or April. Suddenly, people emerge from their homes with new, weird clothing on. And they run to the river and run around in a circle on the river, and then go back in their house. And they do it, like, in lockstep, you'd be like, this must be some powerful religious ceremony that affirms their faith in something.

Well, an anthropologist would definitely conclude it was rites of spring. We're blessing the coming crops.

And these people are like, I look terrible after the winter.

I gotta get out there. I always think of the aliens watching a football game. Some of these monkeys are running into each other, and then all these other monkeys are cheering.

So many of the monkeys don't participate in this thing. In fact, it seems to be 99,012..

And most of the time, nothing's happening at all.

How did you land on humble bragging? This is a great thing to expose.

If you start to notice humble bragging in yourself, by the way, I'm never pointing fingers at anybody else, it's always something I do. Also, it's just the most common thing that people do. And we're studying bragging, actually, because we don't like to brag, but we like to say positive things about ourselves. So the question is, how do you do that without looking like a jerk? and people think that humble bragging is a nice way to do it.

Well, now it's two things right, it's deception and bragging.

Completely, and in fact, we like people better who just brag.

Oh wow, that's interesting.

Than Humble Brag. At least they're being genuine. I think I'm amazing is better than I'm amazing, but I'm not gonna, you know.

Yeah, and for my trigger, yeah, like, I'm gonna deceive you into thinking it occurred to you. I'm amazing. So there's a nefarious plot afoot as well.

The example that really got us onto it actually was a celebrity said. By the way, if ever you see someone say UG, whatever comes after that is a humble brag. ugh, they say Ug, this person said, Ug. My hand is so sore from signing so many autographs. Oh, no.

The victimhood.

A model was like, Ugh, I'm just no makeup and sweats, and everybody's still hitting on me.

Look for the UG. I think I might be guilty of the complaint, Brag.

The victim-y.

Yeah, it's hard to know.

I think you mainly just straight up brag.

I try to because I do think it's more offensive to humble. Brag. Yeah, when you were saying that, I think I have been complaining about something, but implicit in it that I was doing something spectacular.

Right, I think you do. It's not because of a brag, though. You're trying to maybe subconsciously you feel bad that what you're doing is actually spectacular, so you're trying to make it not so bad.

That's how I.

It's like, there's something bad about this, don't worry.

That's how I've explained it. Like, I got a really nice car once and some people knew, and when they would ask me about the car. My first thing is, I would say like, Oh my God, you have to put this fucking clear coat over it.

Or maintenance or something.

And it costs so much money, and that's just because I feel very guilty. I have the car and they don't completely.

One version I love is when a band or any artist gets popular, their second or third album. Many of the songs are about how difficult it is to be so famous. And it's like an industry-wide humble brag, where you only have an album about how hard it is to be famous. If you're famous. You know, that's so hard to be on the road. We played 80 gigs, well, that's kind of a humble brag.

So this?

But it's also true.

No, no, it's true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, I don't think it's ever what people thought it was gonna be. And you're kind of, like, not allowed to say that. See if they went straight to it and go like, Look, I really wanted this more than anybody.

I made a huge mistake.

Does this interest in humble bragging? It must be the direct result of Twitter.

Actually, there was a book on humble bragging and now I forget the comedian's name, and he passed away actually, which is sort of tragic. But he also just collected off of Twitter. I think the book is called either Humble Brag or humble bragging.

And he owed Harris Whittles.

Harris Whittles Harris Whittles.

Yeah, that is.

And he wrote on Parks.

He did, yeah.

Yeah, but a brilliant book, very funny.

He was so funny.

And do we hope, by exposing it well, to bring it up to speed? I have an anthropology degree, so I'm not quick to judge what we do. I think like, Oh, hmm, I wonder what this is servicing, right? So, like gossiping, this is kind of well-studied in anthropology.

It's funny, there's a psychologist named Tom Gilovich, who's an amazing psychologist, also the nicest person in the world. So he shows silly things that people do all the time. But you always feel with him that he's rooting for them, right? And I try to take that from him, which is, of course, we're completely ridiculous.

Yeah, and just try to skin the cat a different way, ultimately, because also this is very cultural, right? This isn't the same in Japan as it is here, but we are selling ourselves.

Completely.

Because we're like any other item in this commodified capitalist thing, we're a product, and increasingly so on the internet.

The best way to do it, by the way, not my research, but research shows, is just to have somebody else say it about you.

Yes.

It's a brilliant workaround, in fact, people will pair off and say, I'll say nice things about you if you say nice things about me in the meeting. And then we can get something going with the boss.

I say this to my daughter all the time, I'm like, let people brag for you. It'll happen, trust me, you're doing spectacular stuff and it'll happen.

Yeah, I just went on a double date, it was a double blind date.

Everyone.

Double blind trial.

No, so it was like, me and my friend, okay, and then everyone, yeah, no one knew each other.

It took like an hour and a half just to find out who was who exactly.

I'm sorry. Were we paired up?

Well, that was kind of confusing, but anyway, so my friend was getting set up with this person. It was a blind date and she told him, I'm going to bring my single friend. You should bring a single friend, too.

Liz was like she was with Bill Gates, amazing.

And I was like, Oh boy, yeah, I could never have said that, but I also wanted it said, of course, so it was kind of a good hack.

It's like a hype, man, right next to you at dinner. It's amazing. We all need that.

It was good.

Okay, so you tackle in this book from habit to ritual, you're talking and exploring ritual, and I think what's maybe most interesting from the jump is that you were skeptical of ritual.

Completely. Now I know that you're an anthropologist. We'll have to.

That's our stock, and trade is ritual.

Because it's what we're doing all the time and we're doing a ritual right now. I started studying them because I thought they were fascinating.

What ones piqued your interest to get you on the path? What was the gateway ritual?

One of the first things was, I just came across this. I told you I was a nerd, an infographic which really struck me.

Hit me hard as a rock, exactly.

You completely blew my mind. But it was a color coded wheel that had in different cultures, the color that they used for different things. Like, what's the color for love in all of these different countries? And it's red in some, but different in other countries.

Always in the red family, though, because of the heart.

Not always, and one of them was for grief.

Let me guess Russia was black.

Everything was black for Russia. All of you, no, that would be Ireland to make fun of my own people, everything would be very dark and dim for Ireland. But there was one that was grief.

And then maybe even within it, informed by the environment. What dyes did they have access to?

Royal blue, you see when new colors are available, humans are like, let's use that now.

Yeah, that's very special and rare.

Wait, so I was wrong about blue, it was Black for America. Grief.

It depends on the religion, actually.

Well, I guess you could split it up, right? What do people wear to the death ceremony?

It's black.

It's black here, but yes, we associate blue with being blue. But it'd be interesting because that's actually a linguistics thing.

Right?

We have named that emotion blue.

Or did we name it blue because we associate the color?

Michael.

I wasn't there when they decided it was a while ago. I think some cultures it's green, it means that it's death, but it's also life.

Oh, that's nice.

You might say green, but on the other hand, when you think about what that culture is signifying, it makes perfect sense that you would use green. Because they view death as differently than someone in another culture.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

The most impactful thing that happened to me in my entire life was that infographic. I also had a daughter, so I've been studying rituals for a while. In my mind, I wasn't using them. My wife and I had our daughter and you go to the hospital and then the child is there.

You had like 36 hours where they teach you how to operate the thing, and so much information's coming.

This comes out of there, this comes out of there.

This is merconium, this'll pass three weeks, you're gonna see this kind of turd.

This is gonna shrivel up eventually, don't worry about it.

And now, when are we supposed to feed it? People? Food 11 months-ish?

Nobody knows avocado seems fine. Yeah, very stressful, and if you talk to new parents, we are annoyingly talking about sleep all the time.

Well, you probably called it a routine, and then we can get into the nitty gritty of What's the difference? totally.

And what happens with parents is they start small and then it gets more and more elaborate over time. So it's these two books in this room, and then you sing this song and I'll sing that song. My daughter had gray bunny and brown bunny. Sorry, she would say gray bun and brown bun, and both needed to be there, but actually, gray bun was more important than brown bun.

Oh my god, the racism starts so young.

Exactly.

They extend longer and longer and longer, and if you can't find the bunny, you're panicked. Oh my god, we're going to do the baby and we're going to sleep. And at some point, I realized we completely developed a ritual without knowing it. Because we had to do it the same way every time. We deeply believed that it would work.

You could almost argue all parenting's for yourself under the facade of for them.

My daughter just reminded me that we used to say goodnight to the stairs. When we walked up the stairs. I would be carrying her and she would say goodnight, stairs and I, as the stairs would say goodnight. And then she would say, What do you need, stairs? I don't know where that came from.

Engage with the stairs, anthropomorphize the stairs. You won't be forced to play the role of stairs, yeah.

And then they will sleep perfectly for the rest of their life.

Oh, you're so bringing me back, and you're right. It grows to a preposterous out of control cause. You would remember, too. Monica. I'm thinking of Atlanta in particular. We had to sing wheels on the bus, but there was three extra verses, cause we had to get TT in there.

I teach a seminar on rituals actually to freshmen. It's one of the first classes they take when they get to Harvard. They're 18 ish years old. I say your assignment this week is to ask your parents about the bedtime ritual when you were little, and they're like, Yeah, I asked my parents. They both started crying.

Yeah.

They knew it beat to beat, they knew the books. The thing I love about that is you can remember what it was like when your kids were little. But these kinds of rituals bring you back in a way that's hard to get to, otherwise, you're really there with them. When I think about saying goodnight to the stairs, I'm on the stairs with her.

You start thinking about what direction all these cultural elements move in when we think of this kind of increasingly thrown away binary paradigm of nature and nurture. And then you look at two people independently coming up with something that everyone else is independently coming up with, right? It's not like you were talking to your friends about, like, So hey, how many books are you reading, and what order?

And it's really no different than people deciding on black for funerals and white for funerals. It has this sense of everyone is doing it, but the way that it's built up is so variable. Yeah, it's so interesting because of that.

Well, it's maybe even more interesting is not ever the specifics, but what situations or context do we see predictably produce a ritual? And there's a bunch, or at least in Anthro, we believe there's a bunch.

There's tons weddings, funerals. Between the ages of 12 and 16. Most cultures and religions are like, we should do something. What it is is completely different from each other. But humans, independently, are like, Oh, are they already 12? yeah.

Thank God we're not maasai send out with a spear to kill a lion. Oh, no thanks, I'll stay a boy.

There's a culture where you wear a glove of bullet ants. Bullet ants is the most painful sting, and the rite of passage is to withstand the pain. You know, the variability is so fascinating.

We're jumping ahead, but fuck it, we're here. Yeah, Rites of Passage, to me are probably the most fascinating one, because, yes, they're something to symbolize the transformation from childhood to adulthood. And what's insanely common, for boys, at least, is these acts of bravery. And like, once you learn about them. And if you're in Anthro and you go through every single known culture, there isn't one without the rite of passage. So you go, Oh, these are standard.

Yeah, and they really do. Mark, Not only you're not a kid anymore, you're a grownup. But in most cultures, and that means you're expected to be a full member of the society which comes with. Don't jump your bike over bonfire, you know what I mean?

A lot of responsibility.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I think losing those can be problematic, really, although I will say so. People often are like, I don't do any rituals, I don't have any rituals. And I'm like, have you ever worn a weird robe and a square hat? And walked across the stage and grabbed a piece of paper and everybody clapped, and then you threw your hat in the air.

We need some unique costumery.

Make it an event tassels.

Oh, the pride with which I had that something for honors, you had more tassels than other people. I just strutted around campus, felt so good.

With just the tassels on.

Exactly, fuck this robe. I don't want anyone to get distracted from the tassels.

Yeah, we had different colored tassels.

Didn't it feel good?

I mean, it's amazing, right, you know? Like, Oh God, a red tassel.

Yeah.

It's got a lightweight, yeah.

He's an assassin dude, what'd he do? 5.3 GPa. Where'd that color come from? Okay, so let's first differentiate ritual from habit and maybe compulsion.

Can I ask you a very silly, trivial question, both of you?

Do you need to go to the bathroom?

Yeah, exactly, that's not trivial.

Do you like me? No, the question is in the morning when you're getting ready, or maybe even at night, when you're getting ready for bed. Do you brush your teeth and then shower, or do you shower and then brush your teeth?

I love this question. I brush my teeth in the shower.

That's disgusting.

I do, too.

Both of you.

That's gotta be anomalous, right? Gotta be low percentage that does that.

I have told my people that I don't do interviews with people who do that, so I'm not sure how this got through the screener.

I think we got enough, I think we go. We've never had a 20 minute interview, but.

We had that color wheel and all that.

That was enough. Do you know when you started brushing your teeth in the shower? did you always?

Do you know what's a big, huge bummer? And I hate to admit it, here in front of you, you know what it is? I'm a guest. I think I adopted it from them.

Ah, interesting.

I mean, guys, how fucking inefficient do you need to be to be splitting that task up?

I think that is what I saw.

You're in the shower already covered in water, brush those teeth.

Do you also go to the bathroom in the shower?

Number one, for sure. And if you don't, you're a liar. I know one thing about you, and that's, you're full of shit. It could happen by accident.

I mean, there's no way to know really what's happening.

It would be as preposterous as getting out of your shower to urinate.

Okay, but before I adopted, I brushed after the shower.

And do you know why you did that?

I guess it's like, that's the end, that would be the last thing before bed.

So people who brush their teeth first and then shower the opposite of that, they think that you're disgusting.

So much judgment.

How can you get in the shower with a gross mouth and not have brushed your teeth? If I do this in an audience first off, half of people do it one way and half do it the other way, which is so weird. And then a tiny percentage. But apparently everyone in this neighborhood does it. Exactly exactly Holly weird.

Everyone in Holly weird.

That's right, we've learned something about the culture today, haven't we the efficiency?

My next tweet's gonna be like, Wrist so sore from brushing my teeth in the shower.

I like it because then everything's done at once, it's very nice.

So efficient.

Would you do it differently? If I asked you to? Well, how would it feel if I said, Hey, can you separate them tomorrow morning?

It's funny because we're cross-pollinating here. But again, maybe I'm lying to myself. It's the efficiency thing, it's like, go before, go after. This is a net zero gain or loss of time, but this scenario you're pitching is like,-.

It's like you're asking to take extra time.

Another task.

Yeah, so what's so interesting to me is that about half of people are like, the two of you. If I say, can you switch the order? You're like, what kind of a question is that? I mean, that's like the dumbest question, and half of people are like, no.

Oh, like, they could never.

No, no one says yes is the point.

People who say yes are like you, I don't care, I can do whatever you want, you know, do whatever order you feel like. Cause it's efficiency, it's like, these are things I need to get done, I'm going to be efficient.

And it'd be very disruptive to your emotional core.

And the positive side is, they say, and when I do it my way, I feel really good, I feel ready to start my day, I feel ready to go. So they're like a risk reward, where if you do it your way, it can feel really good. But kid comes in and interrupts it.

So I don't super identify with that one because it's not a huge thing for me. But you've never met someone with a fucking more complicated ritual in the morning than me. So many things have to happen. One of them would be I brush my teeth after I've drank my first coffee. And then I've got a whole explanation for that. But it's immediately negated by the fact that I'll walk directly in here and have another cup of coffee.

It would taste gross.

And I'd rather make my teeth dirty than clean them. But then I'm ignoring the fact that five minutes later, I drink another cup of coffee with the clean teeth. And it doesn't bother me at all.

But in a different place.

Yes, different setting.

So you left the old coffee and tooth brushing over there. Yup, and now you're new, you over in this other room, right? So you get to start over.

Attack the day back. Yes, now I can have a coffee. I never even consider the cleanliness of my teeth until night.

I can't stop thinking about the brushing teeth, the order. We shouldn't stay here. But if I'm showering in the morning, I do brush my teeth first, but if I'm showering at night, I brush my teeth last.

In the shower.

If I'm not doing it in the shower.

You're being inefficient.

If I'm being inefficient, I agree that you want your teeth clean as soon as possible.

Although I do want to push back on your students. Who said it would be disgusting to enter the shower with a gross mouth, I think they'd be more accurate to say it's gross to exit the shower because you're filthy. That's true to say that you have an issue, that one of the parts of your body's dirty as you enter, the whole thing's a mess.

It makes no sense at all.

Now I understand if you're like, Well, shit, everything's clean, but my mouth is skanky.

Right?

And I've left. I feel like I didn't really get clean. I'm with you.

Yeah.

Okay, we cleaned that up.

I mean, we see couples who haven't realized that they do it differently. And I can see them look at each other like, what the this whole time? And they really, really care. What kind of a human would ever do it in that order? The other person, of course, same thing.

But really quick, because we're contrasting with habit, so some part of the morning routine might be habit, and people wouldn't have any kind of what would be an example of a habit.

I think when you're checking off stuff to get done, I mean, even something like putting their shoes on some people, it's like, I put my shoes on every morning. I have to do that to leave the house because that's what you do and other people are like, let me tell you about how I put my shoes on.

Do you have 20 minutes? Yeah.

And if you talk to like athletes, they're like, let me tell you about how I put my shoes on, it's just shoes. But for some people, some of the time, it gets really built into something that's way more meaningful, way more emotional. That's a good thing if it feels good if you do it, but it's not always a good thing. Because if the shoelace breaks, you're like, I'm doomed.

Oh yeah, yeah, that parts.

Oh man, I'm reminded of I have such a also cumbersome sleep time ritual because I have a hard time falling asleep. We were based in Sedona, I was filming in Flagstaff. We got up there, we went so long and we were gonna start so early that basically it was decided, guys, you have to stay in Flagstaff. And I hadn't brought any of my sleep aids.

Did you at least have Gray Bun with you?

I didn't have any of my snuggies.

Oh my god, oh my God.

It was a miracle. I went to sleep, I had worked it up into such a discomfort. I hit the bed going like, we're fucked.

And I think that's actually really important because the research we did. It's not that rituals are good, if you do more of them, that's terrific, and the seven secret rituals that will, you know. It's not that they're emotional, which can have really positive effects on us, and, like in your example, they can really mess with us as well. They're not just great, they're complicated, and we use them all over our lives.

They work both ways. Because we're offloading our own responsibility in some bizarre way, we're kind of hiding behind the routine and distancing ourselves from our own responsibility, from it. But then that goes the other way. If you don't have it, you will be incapable without it.

It's fascinating, right? Because now you're left to your own devices, and that's not good.

And we already decided I can't handle it. This voodoo I do has to take over. Okay, so you talk to other social psychologists like yourself, and then economists, neuroscientists and anthropologists. So I'm curious how these different fields think about ritual, and I would love to start with economists.

There are some topics that just everyone interested in humans eventually stumbles on, and rituals are for sure one of them. And then the way you study, it is very, very different from discipline to discipline, and almost the orientation speaking of. Are you rooting for the humans or are you trying to show they're making mistakes? You could study rituals to say, what are people doing? This? crazy?....

We're irrational. That would be the thrust of that.

Right, and you're wasting effort, you're wasting time. And then, of course, another view is, if everybody's doing these things all the time, they must be doing something for them. Let's understand it rather than say it's good or bad. Behavioral economics, which is something that I dabble in a bit sometimes. The lens there is, is it rational or not.

Well, a lot of these economic models and tests play these games, where if ultimately they lose or it's a disadvantage to themselves. It's kind of easy to observe. And we would label that irrational because it's against their best interests.

Right, but unclear, I mean, compared to what if? I had done a study where I showed that the way to fall asleep immediately was to snap twice. And you were like, No, no, no. What I like to do is these 19 things I would say, you know what you should do, snap twice. It works for everybody.

Nor do we generally have a great control group who's not doing any rituals and measuring the outcome of their actions.

There's no human that's never taken place in at least one ritual, it's just impossible to avoid.

Involuntarily, they arrived and someone handed someone a cigar. It's tough shit, you're part of a ritual.

Completely.

Okay, so the economists, where would they tend to?

There's a paper that I love and I forget the author because I'm terrible, but we'll find it. But they look to see the frequency of rain dances, of rain rituals in cultures. And so what they're trying to see is what are the conditions under which these emerge? Because rain rituals have occurred spontaneously in cultures over human history. It's not like one came up with it and other people were like, let's do that.

Yeah, yeah, fire the cannon.