Voluntary enrollment, knowing in advance that they have to do this stupid ritual. ~10% dropped out, and another ~20% didn't fill out their food diaries properly. That's selecting for discipline.
Relied on self-reported food diaries ie opening room for placebo effect and/or guilt-motivated lying.
Only lasted 5 days. Pretty much every dietary intervention works for short periods of time.
Relies on calorie-counting, which is wildly inaccurate.
Finally:
> Despite the effectiveness of rituals, participants tended to think the ritual was not very helpful and reported being unlikely to continue it.
I think it's pretty plausible that rituals can have useful effects on behavior, but I don't think experiments like this tell us anything about it, especially once you add in the effects of publication bias etc.
> Null hypothesis testing of correlational predictions from weak substantive theories in soft psychology is subject to the influence of ten obfuscating factors whose effects are usually (1) sizeable, (2) opposed, (3) variable, and (4) unknown. The net epistemic effect of these ten obfuscating influences is that the usual research literature review is well-nigh uninterpretable.
Despite your many reasons to discount the first experiment, their conclusion over six separate experiments is more or less the same as yours: "it's plausible that rituals can have useful effects on behavior" vs "Our body of evidence suggests that rituals can have beneficial consequences for self-control."
What evidence is there that people in this study might have been lying?
I think it's interesting that you completely dismiss calorie counting, which is the only long term strategy that I've seen work consistently for myself & others for weight loss. Why do you say it's wildly inaccurate? How inaccurate is wildly? How accurate does it need to be in order to work?
And an unknown number of participants most likely self-reported incorrect information. People don't like admitting they didn't do something that was asked of them.
Self-reported data is shaky data at best and basing scientific results on it makes the science shaky at best.
> So, we reasoned, when we see ourselves engaging in a ritual, we code that behavior as a sign that we are people with self-control. And thanks to that self-control, we choose the apple (or carrot) over the chocolate and thus reduce our caloric intake.
This is interesting. If I'm understanding the article, the path to applying self-control is to first start viewing ourselves as someone who has self-control. The ritual is merely a trigger to remind ourselves of the identity we've chosen, and then subconsciously we tend to line up our actions with how we view ourselves.
Someone once said, "You can't think yourself into right action; you have to act your way into right thinking."
Because that sounds good and makes some sense to me, I choose to consider it acquired wisdom that I can draw psychological sustenance from with loose regard to its veracity.
Or maybe it just makes you more aware that you're about to eat something, and instead of mindlessly swallowing that snack you engage the decision-making part of the brain, which leads to actually making the eating a decision, rather than an impulse.
In a Philosophize This! podcast on Kant I learned that he was extremely consistent in his routines. Every day he would walk at the same time, eat at the same time, etc. Not exactly the same as rituals, but it finally got me to consider that perhaps consistent routines every day would help me essentially slip into other creative, productive habits via auto-pilot.
If you approach life as a physical system, regular rhythm is the most efficient way to save energy and avoid wearing. Predictable flow is probably very nice on your mind, body and ultimately everything else. And it seems biology tuned us to a lot of external rhythms too. Sun, seasons. I think using every period the best : day to move and work, night to sleep. It seems stupid but I think you end up leveraging a lot of builtins subsystems in you.
I vaguely remember my high school philosophy teacher telling us that Kant had lived freely in his early years, he drank a lot, partied all the time. But after reaching a certain age, he arrived at the conclusion that he had a duty in the society, so he organized his life rigidly. He told his servant to wake him up very early every day at the same hour. He worked and ceased partying. He carefully planned all parts of his life, for example for enjoyment he invited friends to his house for dinner.
I think taking Kant as an example could be flawed here. He didn't organize his life in routines to benefit himself, to make him more productive/happy etc., he organized his life to fulfill his duty and I personally don't think that he was happy in doing that.
My first thought on reading this, was to revisit the idea of praying before eating. It would be hard to get an experiment on this past the review board, perhaps, but one wonders if praying before eating would work differently for atheist vs. religious dieters.
Also, I note that even though the (intentionally senseless) ritual helped reduce calories eaten, the people who used it did not think it helped and said they were unlikely to continue it. If it was part of your religious belief, one assumes you would be more likely to think it was important to continue.
For me the praying before a meal instills not only a sense of gratitude (disclaimer: Catholic here) but also appreciation and respect of the food itself. Even if it's something bland or otherwise uninteresting, I try to appreciate it for what it is, and savor it as much as possible instead of gobbling it up as fast as possible.
I think this would still be applicable outside of a religious context. You don't necessarily need to pray if that's not how your belief works, but you can still have this savoring appreciation of food, and codify that as a conscious moment where you briefly reflect on it before diving into it.
Or to put it in somewhat more general and less loaded terms, saying grace.
I grew up in a UU household, and although we said a grace at dinner, it was not a prayer, since we did not believe in any gods. There was no referent for "you" in "thank you for this food"; rather, it's a general expression of gratitude and acknowledgment of the work that brought the food to our table, and the lives sacrificed in doing so. (Perhaps "we give thanks for this food" would have made more sense.)
Saying grace is similar in many ways to giving a toast, which might be worth further exploration.
The answer is this is not a study, and the audience for this piece is not scientists. This is from scientific american, whose mission is to present easily digested scientific content. Scientific american is written for those interested, but not steeped in, science.
Articles/studies themselves are written for a professional audience, and as such include many jargon terms and require knowledge of advanced methods to fully comprehend. It may be harder for the public to engage with, but if research is dumbed-down in its study/article format, reproducibility would be even harder due to a lack of detail.
Are you reading the actual study? Because what's linked here isn't a study, it's an article about a study. In other words, it's written by a journalist, not a scientist that worked on the study.
This is not a scientific report of a study, but a popular piece based on multiple studies. In an academic article every material claim has to be supported by data or previous literature. The claims have to be well specified and the study must be (or at least should be) explained in enough detail that reader can understand more or less exactly what was actually done. This tends to make very annoying reading, but also makes it clear that the results very rarely are as straightforward, generalizable and strong as presented in a popular article.
The main study report linked in the article seems to be so well paywalled that it is not available via my university's library nor sci-hub.
I've found that behavior that isn't quite a ritual, but unique to that activity can be highly motivating and beneficial to focus as well. Whenever I want to get deeply focused on code writing, I'll start speaking to myself under my breath. A bit like the intention behind vocalizing your thoughts during a coding interview, it's been very helpful for keeping my mind on track.
Those sound like rituals someone with OCD might perform. I wonder if the common thread is that they reduce anxiety in both healthy and unhealthy, and that this reduction leads to increased agency.
Also it would be good to seem other groups replicate this.
TLDR; They encouraged people to make random gestures or perform meaningless tasks before eating and they found a ~10% reduction in calories (self-reported) and ~20% difference in people choosing vegetables over cake.
I wonder if breathing and presencing would have the same effect or stronger. I think our initial urge for sugar / instant gratification comes from our monkey brain and is overpowering but brief. Slowing down allows our rational brain to catch up and make a better long term decision.
This probably applies to more in life than just eating.
I am skeptical of the conclusion because of the imprecise language. For example, concluding ritual may be more effective than stringent dieting. 1. What is the documented efficacy of dieting over the same limited time period? 2. Are dieting and ritual mutually exclusive?
Is eating a carrot instead of chocolate necessarily a demonstration of will power? At least with the other studies, the subjects had a stated goal of weight loss.
How many subjects participated? Were the trials run more than once? The scholarly articles are paywalled, so all we are left with is this article. And this article seems more fitting for a grocery store checkout line rag than for Scientific American.
What magical language are you opposed to? The term "ritual" is pretty well defined: "Rituals are series of steps we take while attaching some kind of symbolic meaning."
In the article, they link to multiple papers they've written on the topic of rituals, as well as quantify their results in the experiment they performed:
"About 58% of the participants in our ritual condition chose the carrot over the chocolate, as compared to only about 35% of those in the control condition and 46% of those in the random-gestures condition."
As the article is in the magazine's "Behavior & Society" section the science in the article seems cogent.
"Ritual" is a word with a variety of connotations. Note that a marriage ceremony is a ritual. That's an everyday use of the word that I don't think you would have objected to or called magical.
Then there's the academic definition, covered elsewhere in this thread.
Here it is: "First, cut your food into pieces before you eat it. Second, rearrange the pieces so that they are perfectly symmetric on your plate. Finally, press your eating utensil against the top of your food three times."
No... That's not really the point of the article. The secret sauce is that /that/ ritual, its /any/ ritual. The premise is that by doing the ritual, you are more liking to do the "correct" thing. Probably (and this is my speculation here) because thus far the "correct" thing was tied to the ritual, and as humans, we like the sense of completion, so once we start the "random" part of the ritual, we want to finish the process, which involves doing the thing.
[+] [-] jamii|7 years ago|reply
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Enacting%20Ri...
Voluntary enrollment, knowing in advance that they have to do this stupid ritual. ~10% dropped out, and another ~20% didn't fill out their food diaries properly. That's selecting for discipline.
Relied on self-reported food diaries ie opening room for placebo effect and/or guilt-motivated lying.
Only lasted 5 days. Pretty much every dietary intervention works for short periods of time.
Relies on calorie-counting, which is wildly inaccurate.
Finally:
> Despite the effectiveness of rituals, participants tended to think the ritual was not very helpful and reported being unlikely to continue it.
I think it's pretty plausible that rituals can have useful effects on behavior, but I don't think experiments like this tell us anything about it, especially once you add in the effects of publication bias etc.
Comes back to http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.392...
> Null hypothesis testing of correlational predictions from weak substantive theories in soft psychology is subject to the influence of ten obfuscating factors whose effects are usually (1) sizeable, (2) opposed, (3) variable, and (4) unknown. The net epistemic effect of these ten obfuscating influences is that the usual research literature review is well-nigh uninterpretable.
[+] [-] dahart|7 years ago|reply
What evidence is there that people in this study might have been lying?
I think it's interesting that you completely dismiss calorie counting, which is the only long term strategy that I've seen work consistently for myself & others for weight loss. Why do you say it's wildly inaccurate? How inaccurate is wildly? How accurate does it need to be in order to work?
[+] [-] SpikeDad|7 years ago|reply
Self-reported data is shaky data at best and basing scientific results on it makes the science shaky at best.
[+] [-] bmer|7 years ago|reply
Some sources on this? (not that I doubt you, it's just that you probably have better references than a quick search might bring up)
Also, if it's inaccurate, what's the alternative?
[+] [-] athenot|7 years ago|reply
This is interesting. If I'm understanding the article, the path to applying self-control is to first start viewing ourselves as someone who has self-control. The ritual is merely a trigger to remind ourselves of the identity we've chosen, and then subconsciously we tend to line up our actions with how we view ourselves.
[+] [-] shrimp_emoji|7 years ago|reply
Because that sounds good and makes some sense to me, I choose to consider it acquired wisdom that I can draw psychological sustenance from with loose regard to its veracity.
[+] [-] Erwin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaycebasques|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terminalcommand|7 years ago|reply
I think taking Kant as an example could be flawed here. He didn't organize his life in routines to benefit himself, to make him more productive/happy etc., he organized his life to fulfill his duty and I personally don't think that he was happy in doing that.
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|7 years ago|reply
Also, I note that even though the (intentionally senseless) ritual helped reduce calories eaten, the people who used it did not think it helped and said they were unlikely to continue it. If it was part of your religious belief, one assumes you would be more likely to think it was important to continue.
[+] [-] athenot|7 years ago|reply
I think this would still be applicable outside of a religious context. You don't necessarily need to pray if that's not how your belief works, but you can still have this savoring appreciation of food, and codify that as a conscious moment where you briefly reflect on it before diving into it.
[+] [-] phyzome|7 years ago|reply
I grew up in a UU household, and although we said a grace at dinner, it was not a prayer, since we did not believe in any gods. There was no referent for "you" in "thank you for this food"; rather, it's a general expression of gratitude and acknowledgment of the work that brought the food to our table, and the lives sacrificed in doing so. (Perhaps "we give thanks for this food" would have made more sense.)
Saying grace is similar in many ways to giving a toast, which might be worth further exploration.
[+] [-] izzydata|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msapaydin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Skunkleton|7 years ago|reply
So the study is selecting for people that have good self control already?
[+] [-] robotkdick|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|7 years ago|reply
Articles/studies themselves are written for a professional audience, and as such include many jargon terms and require knowledge of advanced methods to fully comprehend. It may be harder for the public to engage with, but if research is dumbed-down in its study/article format, reproducibility would be even harder due to a lack of detail.
[+] [-] robotresearcher|7 years ago|reply
This popular-press article doesn’t say, and doesn’t have to. Their actual scientific report will have these dry details and be a more formulaic read.
[+] [-] wccrawford|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jampekka|7 years ago|reply
The main study report linked in the article seems to be so well paywalled that it is not available via my university's library nor sci-hub.
[+] [-] 0wl3x|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] im3w1l|7 years ago|reply
Also it would be good to seem other groups replicate this.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] esmi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrifter|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awb|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if breathing and presencing would have the same effect or stronger. I think our initial urge for sugar / instant gratification comes from our monkey brain and is overpowering but brief. Slowing down allows our rational brain to catch up and make a better long term decision.
This probably applies to more in life than just eating.
[+] [-] groth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Hnrobert42|7 years ago|reply
Is eating a carrot instead of chocolate necessarily a demonstration of will power? At least with the other studies, the subjects had a stated goal of weight loss.
How many subjects participated? Were the trials run more than once? The scholarly articles are paywalled, so all we are left with is this article. And this article seems more fitting for a grocery store checkout line rag than for Scientific American.
[+] [-] robotresearcher|7 years ago|reply
SciAm never publishes formal scientific articles as far as I know. It is a popular magazine about science, not a primary source journal.
[+] [-] windows_tips|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|7 years ago|reply
In the article, they link to multiple papers they've written on the topic of rituals, as well as quantify their results in the experiment they performed:
"About 58% of the participants in our ritual condition chose the carrot over the chocolate, as compared to only about 35% of those in the control condition and 46% of those in the random-gestures condition."
As the article is in the magazine's "Behavior & Society" section the science in the article seems cogent.
[+] [-] phyzome|7 years ago|reply
Then there's the academic definition, covered elsewhere in this thread.
[+] [-] danharaj|7 years ago|reply
Shaking hands with everyone before starting a meeting is a ritual.
Tucking your kid into bed is a ritual.
[+] [-] JTxt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbinv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbirrell|7 years ago|reply