Rituals and Superstitions: They make life just a bit better!

Two recent Scientific American articles got me to thinking about rituals and superstitions and their importance in society and social psychology.

The first one deals with why rituals work.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-rituals-work

Recent research suggests that rituals may be more rational than they appear. Why? Because even simple rituals can be extremely effective. Rituals performed after experiencing losses – from loved ones to lotteries – do alleviate grief, and rituals performed before high-pressure tasks – like singing in public – do in fact reduce anxiety and increase people’s confidence. What’s more, rituals appear to benefit even people who claim not to believe that rituals work. While anthropologists have documented rituals across cultures, this earlier research has been primarily observational. Recently, a series of investigations by psychologists have revealed intriguing new results demonstrating that rituals can have a causal impact on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

The article then goes through discussing several experimental research studies dealing with ritual behaviors. Quite interesting!

The second one was about how rituals actually make food taste better! It briefly describes a recent study that revealed this effect. They also discovered that personal involvement in a ritual was a necessary component. Observing someone else's ritual did not affect the taste, only when performing a ritual themselves did they perceive the food or drink tasting better.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=food-is-tastier-when-part-of-a-ritu-13-08-24

Rituals provide comfort in a confusing world, a semblance of order amid chaos. Shared rituals amplify these feelings of comfort. When an individual performs a simple private ritual, they feel some relief from anxiety, when an entire group perform a shared ritual, the resulting relief is amplified throughout a community, maybe even further, because emotions can spread like a wildfire or contagion.

The bottom line, rituals make us feel better.

For example, when I was diagnosed with MS and started taking Copaxone (a daily injection), I started making a ritual out of my "injection time". I did this for several reasons: 1) to reduce my anxiety at having to give myself a shot while I'm afraid of needles. 2) to make sure that I did it everyday (my past record of remembering a daily medication can be proved by my second born child, lol). 3) to reduce the chances of being interrupted. and 4) to give myself a sense of control over a disease that has no known cure and no real predictable course (relapse can happen at any time and manifest in any form that has to do with the central nervous system).

Rituals are everywhere. I found a great fact sheet about rituals online, about the importance of family rituals.
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/pdf/Rituals_Family.pdf
The following is a brief excerpt:

Many treasured memories center around family rituals. Rituals help us identify who we are both as an individual and as a family; they provide something constant, stable, and secure in a confusing world; they help us make life cycle transitions; and they help us come together
during times of crisis. Rituals also help to create an awareness of our connection with our ancestors and those who will follow after us. Rituals can range from eating meals together on a regular basis, to attending football games, or sitting with family and friends at a large Thanksgiving dinner. According to Harrar (2003, p. 28), family rituals make people “feel happier, better loved, and more strongly a part of families.”

The brief fact sheet continues on to briefly overview the six stages of the family life cycle and the rituals common for each one.

Of course, there is also a dark side of ritual, when it become debilitating rather than helpful. This is most often seen in OCD and Schizophrenia type disorders. Here's a short video about OCD and Religion that's pretty interesting, from 2002 (in other words a younger Dr. Sapolsky, as he's a bit older in the video series I reference further down.

To understand more about this, I saw a series of lectures on Human Behavioral Biology, including topics such as Language, Schizophrenia, and Individual Differences by Dr. Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University on Youtube. Extremely insightful!
Here's a link to a full

25-lecture Course: Human Behavioral Biology (Stanford BIO 250)

http://www.virtualprofessors.com/stanford-bio-250-human-behavioral-biology

This is a biology course presented by Stanford University. It covers how to approach complex normal and abnormal behaviors through biology. How to integrate disciplines including sociobiology, ethology, neuroscience, and endocrinology to examine behaviors such as aggression, sexual behavior, language use, and mental illness.

The course is taught by Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky is a Professor of Biology, Neurosurgery, Neurology & Neurological Sciences at Stanford University.

An Addendum!:

Rituals make us value things more!
http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/new-research-rituals-make-us-value-things-more/