Do Family Traditions Actually Do Anything, Or Do They Just Feel Nice?

In controlled experiments, performing a short fixed sequence before eating something makes people report enjoying it more and say they would pay more for it, and people who performed a ritual after a loss reported less grief and more sense of control than people who did not. Those are the two best-documented effects, they are modest in size, they come from lab studies rather than from anyone's actual Christmas — and the single most-quoted finding in this area, that rituals calm performance nerves, was retracted in 2024. All of that is worth holding at once, so here is what the evidence supports and what it does not.

What counts as a ritual, in the research sense

The useful definition comes from a review by Nicholas Hobson, Juliana Schroeder, Jane Risen, Dimitris Xygalatas and Michael Inzlicht, which describes rituals as "(a) predefined sequences characterized by rigidity, formality, and repetition that are (b) embedded in a larger system of symbolism and meaning, but (c) contain elements that lack direct instrumental purpose."

That third clause is the one that does the work, and it is the one people skip. A ritual contains something that is not strictly necessary. Putting the tree up is a task. Putting the tree up on the same evening, with the same music on, with the same person untangling the lights and the same ugly ornament that goes on first — that is a ritual, and the ugly ornament is exactly the part that has no function. Efficiency is what tells the two apart. If you could streamline it without losing anything, it was a routine.

The same review organises the measured effects into three families: regulating emotion, regulating performance, and regulating social connection. Two of those three have findings solid enough to describe here. One of them has a hole in it, which we will come to.

The enjoyment effect, and how small it is

The clearest demonstration is a set of experiments by Kathleen Vohs, Yajin Wang, Francesca Gino and Michael Norton, published in Psychological Science in 2013.

In the first, 52 students were asked either to perform a short fixed sequence before eating a chocolate bar — unwrap half, break it, unwrap the rest, break it again — or to relax for the same length of time. The ritual group rated their enjoyment at 5.95 against 5.15 for the control group, and said they would pay $0.59 for the bar against $0.34.

The second experiment is the one worth looking at closely, because it separates the ritual from the waiting. A hundred and five students were assigned either a fixed gesture sequence or a random set of gestures, with or without a delay before eating, and then given a carrot — deliberately not a treat. Enjoyment came out highest for the fixed sequence with a delay, and lowest for random gestures with no delay.

Reported enjoyment of the same carrot, by what participants did beforehand. Vohs, Wang, Gino & Norton, Psychological Science 2013, Experiment 2 (105 participants).*

Two things are visible in that chart. The fixed sequence beat the random gestures in both conditions, so it is not simply that any faff helps. And the gap between the best and worst condition is about 1.7 points on the rating scale — real, repeatable in that lab, and nothing like the transformation the phrase "the power of ritual" implies. A third experiment found the effect only held for people who performed the sequence themselves: watching someone else do it scored 3.75 against 4.55 for doing it.

Which is an oddly specific answer to a familiar December argument. If the ritual is something one person performs while everyone else watches, the research says the watchers are not getting the same thing from it.

The grief finding

The second well-documented effect comes from Michael Norton and Francesca Gino, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Across three experiments they asked people to perform a private ritual after a loss — a bereavement, a break-up, or, in the laboratory version, losing a small lottery.

In the first experiment, 247 participants, those who performed a ritual reported grief at 2.12 against 2.37 for those who did not. In the lab version with 109 participants the gap was larger: 2.95 against 4.07. In both, the people who performed rituals also reported feeling less out of control, and the statistical analysis pointed to that feeling of regained control as the route by which the ritual did anything at all.

That mechanism is the interesting part, and it generalises further than chocolate does. A ritual is a thing you can do at a moment when there is nothing to be done. The first Christmas after someone dies has a hole in it in the shape of a person, and there is no action that fixes that. Lighting a candle, laying the place, going to the same walk on the same morning — these are not solutions. They are something to do, performed on purpose, at the moment when the absence of anything to do is the problem.

The part that got retracted

Here is where an honest article has to slow down.

For about eight years, the most repeated claim about rituals was that they reduce performance anxiety: that a fixed pre-performance sequence lowers your heart rate before you sing, speak or compete, and that you do better as a result. It came from a 2016 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes by Alison Wood Brooks, Juliana Schroeder, Jane Risen, Francesca Gino, Adam Galinsky, Michael Norton and Maurice Schweitzer. It was covered everywhere, and it is cited in the review quoted at the top of this article.

That paper was retracted in 2024. The retraction notice appears in the same journal, volume 185. Reporting in The Chronicle of Higher Education in November 2023 described Schroeder, one of the co-authors, saying that data for four of the paper's experiments could not be tracked down, including the pilot study, and that the team was in the process of retracting it.

This matters beyond the one paper. Francesca Gino, a co-author on that paper, is also a co-author on the consumption studies and the grief studies described above, and her research record has been the subject of investigation and of several retractions across her wider body of work. As far as I have been able to verify, neither the 2013 consumption paper nor the grief paper has been retracted or corrected. That is a statement about their current status, not a guarantee about their contents, and it is the honest position: the findings stand as published, in a literature where a neighbouring paper by overlapping authors did not survive scrutiny. Treat the numbers above as the best available evidence rather than as settled fact, and treat anyone who tells you rituals will calm your nerves before a speech as quoting a retracted paper.

What the family research adds, and what it cannot show

Family routines and rituals have their own literature, largely separate from the lab work, and it is worth knowing what shape it is. Barbara Fiese, who has spent a career on it, frames family routines and rituals as the settings in which family health happens — mealtimes, bedtimes, the organisation of an ordinary week — and links them to things like how well children with chronic conditions stick to treatment.

The important limitation is structural. Most of this research is observational: it compares families who have more organised routines with families who have fewer, and finds differences. Families with settled routines also tend to differ in a dozen other ways — money, working hours, housing stability, how many adults are in the house, whether anyone is ill. You cannot randomly assign families to have traditions for a decade, so the causal claim that traditions produce the outcome is not available, and any article that tells you traditions will make your children turn out better is going beyond the evidence.

What survives that caution is modest and still useful: repeated, marked family practices are associated with better-organised family life, and the lab work gives a plausible mechanism for part of why they might feel like they matter.

What makes a repeated act work as a ritual

From the definition and the experiments, four features do the work. None of them requires the tradition to be nice, expensive or photogenic.

1. A fixed sequence. The same things, in the same order. The random-gesture condition in the carrot experiment was the same amount of faff and did less.

2. Repetition. It has to have happened before. A first-time activity is an event; it becomes a ritual on its second or third outing, which is why the small dull traditions outlast the grand annual outings.

3. Something with no purpose. The ugly ornament. The specific mug. The order the presents are opened in, which makes no sense and is non-negotiable. Strip these and you are left with a schedule.

4. Everyone performs it. The third experiment found the effect for performers and not for observers. If one person does the whole tradition while the rest of the household watches them do it, the research suggests the watching does not deliver the same thing.

Keeping one alive when the family changes shape

Traditions break for ordinary reasons: someone moves out, someone dies, a relationship ends, a child grows past the version of the thing that worked at six. The usual failure is trying to run the old ritual exactly as it was with the wrong people in it, discovering it feels hollow, and dropping it.

A more workable approach, and one consistent with what the definition says actually matters:

- Keep the sequence and shrink the scale. Three people can do the same order of things as nine.

- Move the non-functional element, don't delete it. If the ugly ornament belonged to a house you no longer live in, it can go on a smaller tree. The pointlessness is the load-bearing part.

- Let the person who is gone keep a role. A place, a walk, a dish nobody else likes. On the grief evidence, doing something on purpose is the active ingredient, not resolving anything.

- Give everyone a job. Even a trivial one. Performers, not audience.

- Start new ones deliberately and repeat them twice. A thing done once is an anecdote. Done three years running, it is what someone will want back in twenty years' time.

Frequently asked questions

Do family traditions make children happier or better adjusted?

Nobody can say that from the existing evidence. The family research is observational: it compares households that differ in many ways at once, and it cannot separate the traditions from everything else that tends to come with them. What it does support is an association between organised, repeated family practices and better-organised family life. Mind Decoded's position is that this is worth knowing and not worth overselling — if someone promises you a developmental outcome from a Christmas tradition, they are ahead of the data.

Does it have to be a big occasion to count?

No, and the size may be the least important variable. The measured effects in the lab came from sequences lasting under a minute — unwrapping a chocolate bar in a set order. What the definition requires is a fixed sequence, repetition, and an element with no practical purpose. A specific walk on a specific morning satisfies all three; an expensive annual outing that happens differently every year satisfies none of them.

Is it true that rituals calm your nerves before a performance?

That claim comes from a 2016 paper that was retracted in 2024, so it should not be repeated as an established finding. The retraction does not prove the underlying idea is false — it means that particular evidence for it can no longer be relied on. There is separate evidence that rituals help people regulate emotion after a loss, which is a different situation from nerves before a performance, and it should not be stretched to cover it.

Why does the "pointless" bit matter so much?

Because it is what distinguishes a ritual from an efficient procedure. In the reviewed definition, a ritual contains elements that lack direct instrumental purpose — and in the carrot experiment, the fixed sequence outperformed an equal quantity of random gestures, which suggests the structure is doing something the faff alone does not. A practical test: if you could streamline the activity without anyone objecting, it was a routine, and streamlining it costs you nothing.

Our traditions feel forced now that the family has changed. Should we stop?

That is a decision about your household rather than a question the research answers, and there is no evidence that persisting with something that feels hollow does anyone good. What the evidence does suggest is that the specific elements matter less than the structure — the same order of things, done by everyone present, including one part that serves no purpose. A tradition rebuilt at a smaller scale is not a lesser version of it.

Does watching a tradition count, or do you have to take part?

In the one experiment that tested this directly, people who performed a ritual themselves reported more enjoyment than people who watched someone else perform the same one — 4.55 against 3.75 on the study's scale. That is a single finding in a small sample and should not be treated as a law. But it points the same way as common sense: giving everyone a small job is cheap, and there is some reason to think it matters.

Is any of this about religion?

The research described here is about the structure of repeated behaviour, not about belief, and the studies include entirely secular rituals invented in a laboratory. Religious rituals appear in the wider literature, but nothing above depends on them. Mind Decoded takes no position on religious questions; the interest here is in why a fixed sequence with a pointless component behaves differently from the same activity without one.

Connect

Questions or thoughts? Reach out anytime.

Email

subscribe to our newsletter

hello@minddecoded.com

© 2026. All rights reserved.

Terms of Service Privacy Policy Disclaimer