The odds are good that you have seen the Ted Talk that Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton delivered in 2012. “How to Buy Happiness,” has been viewed nearly five million times. In Norton’s new book, he turns his focus and expertise to a topic of truly cosmic importance. Why did Nomar Garciaparra adjust his batting gloves so many times before stepping into the box? Or, more generically, why are we—athletes, performances, homo sapiens—so prone to routines?
The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions was released on April 9. In the book, Norton makes a strong case that athletes who wink before shooting free throws … bounce the ball a set number of times before shooting … or religiously tug their sleeves before batting … they’re not only behaving normally; they’re acting in service of maximizing performance.
Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton unpacks the role of ritual in his latest book.
Steph Stevens
Norton recently spoke about sports rituals with Sports Illustrated. The exchange (lightly edited for brevity and clarity) below:
Sports Illustrated: Let’s start macro. What’s the point of ritual?
Michael Norton: From the earliest evidence of humans, the way that we usually decide that there was a culture is if people were buried ceremoniously. Dinosaur fossils are all jumbled up. So we know the dinosaurs didn’t have funerals. But people, are arrayed with gold in a grave. We say, ‘Oh, they must have had a culture.’
That’s how tightly linked rituals are to what humans are up to. And then in our work, they seem to be something that we turn to solve problems. We use them to amp us up, but we also use them to calm ourselves down. So it’s a funny tool. We can use it very flexibly for whatever we’re looking for. And performance is the most fun domain that we studied.
SI: I think you had a typo in the book. You wrote baseball players make 83 separate movements, on average, when they step up to play. That can’t possibly be right, can it?
MN: It is. With the bat alone, do you clench it twice? Do you do them at the same time? Do you wiggle the bat? All of these things add up to 83. And some people are way beyond that. They’re like twice as many kinds of actions when they’re up there.
SI: Who is the winner?
MN: I mean, I’m biased because I’m in Boston, so I think it’s Nomar [Garciaparra]. I don’t know his exact number, but batting gloves alone had to be a hundred [movements] because he just didn’t stop.
SI: What’s driving this?
MN: This thing you’re amping up for—you gotta hit a ball over a hundred miles an hour—you gotta really bring it. And so it’s not surprising that these athletes start to develop all of these rituals and superstitions to try to get to that point where they feel like they can perform at that level. One that’s funny: we allow them to do it, and we don’t really judge them. But, if we’d started this call and I was like, ‘Hold on a second, and I wanted to do a whole [routine],’ you’d be like, ‘Oh my god. You’re insane. This isn’t that stressful.’
So if someone’s doing something very stressful, we’re like, That’s totally fine. But if I do it in my everyday life, it’s totally not fine at all. So we can calibrate our acceptance.
SI: Is it the stress? Or do you think it’s that we give people doing something at an elite level a license that we wouldn’t give the mailman delivering mail? You’d say, what the hell is he doing? But, hey. If Serena Williams wants to bounce the ball a different number of times between first serves versus second serves, well, she’s Serena Williams.
MN: Yeah. I think that we’re aware of how much harder what they’re doing is than anything we do. And give them a huge latitude on doing all of these crazy things. Whereas if we do it ourselves, like, if you’re getting psyched up before a meeting, you don’t do it in public. You go into the bathroom and, like, shout at yourself in the mirror privately. You know what I mean? So we realize that other people are gonna think we’re crazy if we do them like that, so we hide and do them in private.
SI: How much of ritual is offense and how much of this is defense? How much of this is Please let something affirmatively let me hit a home run, and how much of this is Please don’t let me blow out my knee?
MN: Yeah, when you look at uncertainty across different professions and different tasks, the more uncertainty there is, the more likely people are to use rituals. So in baseball, we have the batters [rituals] because most of the time they fail. And when you’re in the field, you know, it’s 98, 99 percent success rate, way fewer rituals. Same person. Right? I’m batting, and I’m an insane ritual person. I go out to left field, and I’m just standing around. I couldn’t care less.
