Why humans need ritualsAnd what the science actually holds up

Ritual shows up in every known human society. Dimitris Xygalatas, the anthropologist who runs the Experimental Anthropology Lab at the University of Connecticut, builds his 2022 book Ritual on that fact, and it's the right place to start. My short answer to "why do humans need rituals?" goes like this. Rituals help us carry what we can't control, and they tie us to the people standing next to us.

The longer answer is better. The science of ritual has gotten serious over the past fifteen years, and I built Ritual OS on it, so I've read a lot of it. Here's what holds up.

A ritual is a fixed sequence of actions, repeated, that means more than what it physically does. Lighting a candle to see in the dark is a chore. Lighting one on the anniversary of a death is a ritual.

Researchers describe rituals as fixed, repeated sequences of actions that carry meaning but have no direct practical purpose. That last part is the strange one. Lighting a candle brings no one back. Walking the same path every spring changes nothing about the weather. People do these things anyway, and researchers keep finding that the doing changes something inside them.

Because the thing a ritual changes is the person doing it. That's the core of a 2018 review by Nicholas Hobson, Juliana Schroeder, Jane Risen, Dimitris Xygalatas and Michael Inzlicht in Personality and Social Psychology Review.

They pulled together decades of studies and argued that rituals do regulatory work. Emotion comes first. Rituals settle feeling when the future is uncertain. The second job is performance, steadying people before an exam or a stage. The third is social. Rituals bind separate people into a group that acts as one.

They also described two routes. Bottom-up effects come from the physical acts, the repetition and the rhythm. Top-down effects come from what the acts mean to you. Good rituals work on both at once.

The lab work backs this up. In a 2015 study in Current Biology, Martin Lang, Xygalatas and their colleagues asked 62 students to prepare a speech about a metal sculpture. Half had to deliver it to a panel of experts. The other half didn't. Then everyone cleaned the sculpture while motion-capture cameras tracked their hands. The anxious group cleaned with more repetitive, rigid movements, and their heart rates predicted how ritual-like those movements became. Under stress, people reach for ritual on their own.

When people do a ritual together, the bodies of the people who love them can fall into step, even without touching. The clearest evidence comes from a village in Spain.

Every June 23 at midnight, in San Pedro Manrique, a village of about 600 people, fire-walkers cross a seven-meter carpet of burning oak coals. In 2011, Ivana Konvalinka, Xygalatas and their colleagues published a study in PNAS after recording heart rates from 38 people there. Twelve were fire-walkers. Nine were spectators related to a walker or friends with one. Seventeen were visitors with no connection to anyone on the coals.

The walkers' heart rhythms and those of the people who loved them rose and fell in matching patterns. The strangers' hearts didn't follow.

Nobody was touching. The spectators sat in the stands while the walkers crossed the fire. Their hearts tracked each other anyway, because of who they were to each other. I think about that finding more than any other in this field.

A 2020 study went quieter. Martin Lang, Jan Krátký and Xygalatas worked with the Marathi Hindu community in Mauritius, an island where floods and cyclones are real threats. They first raised participants' stress by asking them to write a disaster plan that government experts would review. Then half went to a local temple and performed a familiar ritual, while the other half sat and relaxed in a non-religious space. The ritual group showed a bigger drop in both reported anxiety and physiological stress, which the team tracked through heart rate variability.

Xygalatas explained the result in plain terms. Ritual, he said, helps reduce anxiety "by providing the brain with a sense of structure, regularity, and predictability."

No. In a 2017 experiment, Hobson, Devin Bonk and Michael Inzlicht gave people a made-up ritual, a short set of new actions with no tradition or belief behind it, and had them repeat it at home for a week.

Back in the lab, the researchers recorded brain activity while people did a demanding task. After the ritual, the usual spike of alarm in the brain when people made a mistake was smaller. The study was pre-registered, and it found no change in how well people performed, better or worse. The ritual had been invented that week. Nobody believed in it.

Belief still adds something. The 2018 review calls it the top-down route, the meaning an act carries for you, and it works alongside the bottom-up route of rhythm and repetition. Meaning counts, even when no god is involved. I wrote a full piece on that idea, Rituals without religion: how to practice if you don't believe.

Because loss is where control disappears, and a ritual hands a small piece of it back. Grief researchers have studied this, and their results are more modest than you might expect.

In the Netherlands, a team led by Huibertha Mitima-Verloop surveyed bereaved people six months after a death and again three years after, 552 people at the first point and 289 at the second. Most said the funeral and the rituals that followed had helped them. But the researchers found no clear link between those rituals and how intense people's grief was later.

I find that honest, and useful. A ritual doesn't shortcut grief. What it does is give grief a time and a place to go.

Every culture also has formal versions, and several of them fit a kitchen table. I gathered some in Grief rituals from around the world you can do at home.

Pick one moment in your day, attach one small action to it, and repeat it on purpose. Then borrow from a tradition that has already tested the shape for centuries.

The research points to two things worth getting right. Fixed steps, because the sequence itself is part of what steadies you. And meaning, which travels best through a practice that has a name and a home. When you light a yahrzeit candle, you're joining Jewish families who mark every anniversary of a death this way. When you greet the morning with a few rounds of surya namaskar, you're doing something South Asians have done in many forms for a very long time.

Name the tradition when you use a practice. That's respect, and it's also accuracy. Some ceremonies belong only to the communities that hold them, and those stay with their keepers. Plenty of open practices remain, and they're generous with newcomers who come to them with care.

That's what I built Ritual OS to do. It matches you with short practices from the world's traditions, each named with its tradition and where it's from, and it adapts them week by week as your life shifts. You can do them alone or with the people close to you.

Inside Ritual OS

Practices with a name and a home

Ritual OS matches you with short practices from the world’s traditions, each named with its tradition and where it’s from, and adapts them week by week. You can do them alone or with other people.

Real screens from the Ritual OS iPhone beta.

The Ritual Connection

Knowing why rituals work is the easy part. Finding the one that fits the week you're actually having is harder, and that's the work Ritual OS does, matching you with short practices from the world's traditions and adjusting as you go. Ritual OS can match you with practices for this.

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