An important note before the article begins

The most widely cited study in this area — Brooks, Schroeder, Risen, Gino et al. (2016), “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety” — was retracted in November 2024 after a self-initiated author audit found data anomalies including streaks of heart rate ratings that were unlikely to have occurred naturally. The authors stated they no longer had confidence in the integrity of the data. The retraction is documented publicly at ScienceDirect.

This matters because that paper was the foundational experimental claim that rituals causally reduce physiological anxiety. The claim should not be treated as established. The broader ritual psychology literature — Norton and Gino’s separate work on meaning and grief, the neural evidence from Hobson et al.’s 2017 integrative review, and the anthropological and evolutionary literature on ritual functions — remains intact. This article is built on that surviving evidence base.

What a ritual actually is

Michael Norton and Francesca Gino’s research programme established the foundational framework. A ritual is defined as a predefined sequence of symbolic actions often characterised by formality and repetition that lack direct instrumental purpose. The definition contains what makes the subject interesting: the actions serve no direct functional goal, yet they produce measurable psychological effects. The question is why.

The framework identifies three core elements. Physical: specific actions performed in a specific sequence. Communal: performed collectively with shared participation. Psychological: imbued with meaning that transcends the instrumental content of the actions. The critical insight is that the meaning is not intrinsic to the ritual’s content — it is conferred by the shared act of performing it together. Through surveying workers about group rituals in the workplace, Norton and colleagues determined that group rituals enhance the meaning of work by creating moments of shared identity that transcend individual roles. Performing even simple rituals together enhanced collective tasks including brainstorming.

The labelling effect: the word “ritual” does psychological work

One finding from the broader literature that survived the retraction is the labelling effect. The same sequence of actions produces different outcomes depending on whether the participant understands it as a ritual or as random behaviour. The label is not merely descriptive — it is partly constitutive of the psychological effect. This finding has a specific implication for workplace design: introducing a team activity as a “ritual” or “tradition” activates mechanisms that introducing the same activity as a “team-building exercise” may not, because the latter label does not invoke the same social identity, control, and meaning mechanisms that the ritual frame activates.

The neural evidence: how rituals change error processing

Hobson, Schroeder, Risen, Xygalatas and Inzlicht’s 2017 integrative review — which survives the retraction of the experimental Brooks et al. paper — documents EEG evidence that rituals reduce error-related negativity, the neural marker of performance monitoring that fires when a mistake occurs. Participants who performed a ritual before a task showed reduced ERN amplitude when they made errors compared to controls. The ritual did not prevent errors but changed how the brain processed them — dampening the neural alarm response that makes failure aversive.

The proposed mechanism is goal-regulation through predictable sequencing. The brain’s anxiety response in performance contexts is partly driven by uncertainty about whether one can control the outcome. A ritual — through its fixed, predictable, controllable sequence — provides an experience of control and successful agency immediately before the performance context in which control feels most uncertain. This is the mechanism that makes arbitrary or apparently pointless rituals work: their content is irrelevant to the performance being attempted. What matters is their structure, their predictability, and the fact that they are successfully completed. The ritual is a controllable, completable action sequence in a world where the subsequent performance is not fully controllable.

Social identity: the group ritual as belonging signal

Social identity theory predicts that group membership is psychologically meaningful only to the extent that the group’s identity is made salient and the individual’s membership in it is actively performed. Group rituals are one of the most powerful available mechanisms for making group identity salient: they require simultaneous participation, create shared behavioural memories, and produce the felt sense of synchronised experience that strengthens the psychological reality of the group.

The consistency dimension is important: the ritual’s repetition across time is not mere habit but is the mechanism by which the group identity it instantiates accumulates. Each repetition is both a performance of the current group identity and a reference to all previous performances — creating the temporal depth that makes group belonging feel psychologically real rather than merely claimed. This is why IDEO’s Tea Time — a daily company-wide pause for communal tea — functions as a workplace ritual despite having no instrumental productivity function. It creates a daily moment of shared experience that makes group membership salient, provides a controllable and predictable structure, and creates the temporal anchor that the ritual research identifies as meaning-generating.

Why mandated rituals fail

Although workplace rituals are effective when authentically adopted, imposing them from above reliably undermines their function. A ritual imposed by management is experienced as a managerial tool, not as an expression of group identity. The group identity it invokes is “the management’s expectation” rather than “our group.” A mandated ritual will be resisted precisely because its imposed character undermines the autonomy that makes group rituals feel like authentic expressions of belonging rather than performative compliance. The practical recommendation from the research is to observe what teams are already doing — how meetings start, what informal practices recur — and expand those organic patterns into acknowledged rituals rather than designing new ones from above.

Control restoration in uncertainty

Norton and Gino’s surviving work on mourning rituals found that rituals reduce grief and increase feelings of control during uncertainty and loss. This finding extends the ritual mechanism beyond performance contexts into existential ones. Anxiety, grief, and performance pressure all share the common property of confronting the person with something they cannot control. The ritual provides a structured, controllable, completable sequence that restores the felt sense of agency. The ritual does not resolve the uncontrollable situation — it provides a psychological counterpoint that prevents the anxiety from becoming paralysing.

For entrepreneurs building teams, this extends to organisational change contexts: when teams experience uncertainty, disruption, or loss — a colleague’s departure, a failed product launch, a strategic pivot — rituals are a psychological resource that restores the felt sense of shared control, not a trivial nicety.

If the anxiety, uncertainty, or loss of control described in this article connects to something more personally significant — something that is affecting your wellbeing significantly — support is available. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.

A book worth reading alongside this

The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile is the most practically grounded contemporary treatment of how to design meaningful rituals in secular and workplace contexts. Ter Kuile’s framework for identifying what makes any repeated practice become a genuine ritual rather than mere routine — and what distinguishes rituals that develop meaning over time from activities that remain empty habits — is directly applicable to the workplace context the article describes. For any entrepreneur who wants to understand not just what the psychology predicts about rituals but what specifically to do to build them authentically in a team environment, this is the most accessible and most practically direct available starting point.

Have questions about this article?

If any part of this article raised questions you want to explore further, courbot.co is built for exactly that. It is courben.co’s AI assistant, designed around the psychology of entrepreneurship. Ask it anything from this article.

If the uncertainty or loss described in this article is significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP therapist finder: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Norton, M.I. & Gino, F. (2014), Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 266–290. Hobson, N.M. et al. (2017), Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21(3), 260–284. Brooks et al. (2016) — retracted November 2024. Wiltermuth, S. & Heath, C. (2009), Psychological Science, 20(1), 1–5.