Block cautions that the effect isn’t universal. It’s more apparent in people she terms “high experiential processors”—that is, people who rely more on faith and intuition, and less on logic.
Indeed, the question of what types of people are more superstitious than others has been explored for years. In general, women are more superstitious than men; people with less formal education and lower intelligence are more superstitious than those with degrees or high IQs; and nonreligious people are more superstitious than the faithful. Certain professions also exhibit higher levels of superstition, including athletes, actors, gamblers, miners, and sailors.
4.
Chad Knaus insists he’s not superstitious. He attributes his success as a NASCAR crew chief to a single factor: his work ethic. Outsiders agree with that assessment.
Since 2002, Knaus has led the hundred-person group of mechanics and pit crew who build, support, and repair driver Jimmie Johnson’s No. 48 Lowe’s Chevrolet, forming one of the most successful racing teams in the history of the sport. In the process, Knaus, forty-five, has earned a reputation for his ninety-hour workweeks. Press clippings call him a workaholic, insanely intense, and single-minded. Before his 2015 marriage to a former Miss Vermont, Knaus burned through a series of girlfriends, with the demise of each relationship publicly attributed to his inability to put aside his work and carve out time for romance.
When you talk to Knaus about how he manages the complex operation that is a modern NASCAR team, he describes workdays that routinely stretch more than twelve hours as he watches many hours of video of prior races, looking for trends and patterns. He’ll tell you about his team’s statistical operation, and how they’re using big data to find the optimal moments for pit stops to refuel and change tires.
So he doesn’t believe in superstitions, karma, or good luck? He shrugs. “Not so much,” he says. “I’m a believer in the saying ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’”
But if you spend time around the 48 team on the hundred-acre compound it occupies outside Charlotte, North Carolina, you’ll spot Knaus engaging in some strange trends and patterns of his own—some of which have no obvious relationship to the business of racing.
There is, for instance, the bonsai tree Knaus keeps in his office. He received his first bonsai as a gift during the 2005 NASCAR season, his fourth year working with Johnson, who at that point had never won the Sprint Cup, NASCAR’s season champion. Late that year, with Johnson riding neck and neck in the chase for first place, Knaus became so preoccupied with work that he forgot to water his plant. It died. Around the same time, Johnson finished poorly in a race, knocking him out of contention.
The death of Knaus’s bonsai tree and Johnson’s failure to win a championship became connected in Knaus’s mind as contiguous events.
Soon afterward, Knaus’s assistant bought him a replacement bonsai tree. Since he’d drawn this loose mental connection between mistreating his bonsai and watching his race team lose, Knaus began a new set of rituals during Nascar’s grueling ten-month season, actions aimed at preventing a reoccurrence of the bad luck bonsai death. Each Thursday afternoon, before boarding the private jet that will fly him to that weekend’s race, Knaus spends a few minutes tending to his bonsai. He waters it. He carefully prunes dying leaves. Then, to show respect to the dead foliage, he carries the leaves outside his office and returns them to the earth. “I give it a little love and affection,” Knaus says. The ritual is superstitious, but it also serves an inadvertent but useful purpose: Amid an insanely busy and deadline-driven workday, it forces Knaus to take a quiet, reflective pause, to catch his breath before the rush to get to the airfield on time.
Since Knaus got this replacement tree and began taking better care of it, Jimmie Johnson has won seven Nascar championships, including a record five in a row from 2006 to 2010. It isn’t weird if it works.
Knaus, who was raised in Illinois and began working as a crew member on his father’s racing team as a child, says he didn’t grow up in an environment focused on rituals or lucky practices. His perspective changed, however, at nineteen, when he moved to North Carolina to begin working full time on NASCAR teams. “When I got to the South, that’s when the superstitions came out,” Knaus says. For instance, among the racing teams he encountered in Charlotte, there was a unanimous belief that fifty-dollar bills are unlucky. As a result, when office managers go to the bank to retrieve cash and hand out per diem payments to race teams for each week’s race, everyone finds it completely normal that the cash is all in tens, twenties, or hundred-dollar bills. Never, ever a fifty.
“Oh yeah, I guess I have another one,” Knaus says sheepishly. Early each Thursday morning, before leaving his home for work (and knowing he won’t be home until after the race on Sunday night), he hand-winds a grandfather clock he won as a prize in a long-ago NASCAR race. “If I come home on Sunday night and we had a bad race, I look at the clock,” he says. “If it’s not swinging and it’s unwound, I say, ‘Well, I guess that’s why . . .’”
While Knaus has his individual weekly superstitions, he also participates in the group rituals that have become a part of life on the 48 team. For instance, each February, once the race cars are built, double-checked, and ready to be loaded into trailers to be driven to the season-opening Daytona 500, the team members come together and hand-wax the cars. To put this in perspective, at the time I interviewed him, Knaus lived in a house worth nearly $3 million; he spends much of his workday in meetings and on e-mail and admits he hasn’t used a wrench in years. So waxing cars is way below his pay grade. But the waxing ritual is an important moment of team bonding. It also illustrates how everyone in the group, no matter what their status or function, is caring for the cars they depend on for their livelihood and success. After the wax is applied, they take a giant Styrofoam replica of a Kobalt hammer—a tool made by their sponsor, Lowe’s—and put it on the hood of the car as it’s loaded up into the trailer. “It signifies that the car is done, and it’s ready to go to the racetrack,” says Knaus.
The rituals don’t end when the race does. When Johnson or one of the other three drivers from Hendrick Motorsports wins a race on Sunday, the following morning a large, wheeled replica of the Liberty Bell is pushed around the company’s campus. Each employee takes a turn ringing it to celebrate the victory.
Johnson, who spends Sunday afternoons strapped into the driver’s seat, doesn’t overthink his team’s lucky rituals. “We like to joke that we’re not sure we’re superstitious, but we like to cover our bases just in case,” Johnson told me a few days after winning a big race. For instance, Johnson admits to being continually on the lookout for heads-up pennies on the ground, which he likes to retrieve and glue to the dashboard of his racecar.
Johnson says, “At different times in my career I have felt that superstitions may have helped. It’s all just a mindset. The power of our minds and brains is massive, and modern medicine is just starting to recognize the effects of positive attitude.”
5.
Knaus’s set of prerace activities gives rise to an important question. Some prerace rituals, like trimming the bonsai tree, he does alone. It’s a solo, one-person ritual. Other activities—waxing the car, ringing the bell—are done as part of a group.
So for people participating in a group performance, are individual rituals or group rituals more effective?
A few years ago, Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton and some colleagues tried to answer that question. They began by gathering 221 people and giving them a strange assignment. They had to form groups of 2 to 4 people and run around the campus, taking group selfies in front of specific locations. They were given exactly forty-five minutes, with points deducted from their score for every minute they were late returning to the meeting point. The group that photographed themselves in the most spots would win a cash prize.
Before this selfie scavenger hunt began,
however, there was one important thing that some of the groups had to do. They were instructed to form a circle and perform a series of rhythmic claps and foot stomps, followed by putting their hands into middle and shouting “Let’s go”—a routine they performed three times, getting a little faster each time.
The other groups didn’t do a ritual. Instead, they were instructed to spend a few minutes reading an article in silence.
When the scavenger hunt was finished, the results showed the groups that had executed the prehunt ritual performed better in several ways. They successfully photographed themselves at more locations, on average. They were less than half as likely to have missed the forty-five-minute deadline. In a posthunt survey, the groups that had done the clapping ritual reported liking each other more than the groups that had read in silence.
In other experiments, Norton and his colleagues had hundreds of people do group creativity tasks, such as brainstorming how many uses they could devise for an object. In these tests, everyone had to do a strange ritual involving rolling dice and waving arms in patterns. Some people did the ritual solo, sitting alone in a cubicle; others did it as a group. The results showed that doing the dice-and-wave routine in a group increased the team’s creativity and led members to like each other more. Anecdotally, the researchers also noticed that the ritual groups were more likely to do things that weren’t an assigned part of the experiment, such as coming up with team names, or arranging a group lunch afterward.
Norton, who earned a doctorate in psychology at Princeton and is now a professor in Harvard’s marketing department, first became interested in rituals after reading Harvard president Drew Faust’s 2008 book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. The book chronicled how the nation dealt with losing 2 percent of its population—more than six hundred thousand men—on battlefields in just four years. The war changed the way people talked and thought about death, as well as how they grieved.
“One of the things that really struck me about how people dealt with death was the rituals, in particular, the clothing rituals in the South,” Norton says. Under the system that evolved, mourners would wear black clothing for a certain period of time, and then gray clothing, and then a small bit of lavender clothing. The clothing progression seemed to serve multiple purposes. It helped give the mourners a road map and a timetable for navigating their grief, and it helped give those in contact with the mourners a visual reminder of precisely where the grief-stricken individual was in their journey beyond their loved one’s death.
The system seems to make sense, but as a student of psychology, Norton began asking himself precisely what emotional purpose it served. Do rituals really work to make people feel better? If so, how and why? Do they only affect our emotions, or, by affecting our emotions, can they affect how we perform tasks? Norton poured through existing literature on rituals, much of it done by anthropologists. It was vividly descriptive—lots of the studies involved primitive tribal groups—but there was nothing experimental and nothing that sought to show or understand cause and effect. Over the next few years, he and some colleagues aimed to fill that void.
In addition to the paper on group rituals, Norton has coauthored three other studies on rituals. One studied how rituals affect consumption, and required subjects to engage in various actions—elaborate unwrapping, knocking on desks, deep breaths, closing eyes—before eating chocolate, carrots, and lemonade. A second study examined how rituals affect how people feel about relationships that ended, deaths, or financial losses. The studies showed that rituals increase people’s consumption experience by increasing their involvement. (This is why restaurants engage in fussy bottle-opening and tasting regimens when serving wine.) They also found that rituals help people feel better after losses, even if they claim not to be big believers in rituals.
Norton also partnered with Alison Wood Brooks, the Harvard colleague whose reappraisal research was featured in Chapter One, to study how rituals affect pre-performance anxiety. In a reprise of the methodology used in Brooks’s dissertation, they had subjects sing “Don’t Stop Believin’” using Wii karaoke in front of a researcher. However, beforehand, half the subjects were told to perform a specific ritual. (The instructions: “Draw a picture of how you are feeling right now. Sprinkle salt on your drawing. Count up to five out loud. Crinkle up your paper. Throw your paper in the trash.”) The singers who completed the ritual sang significantly better and reported feeling less anxiety when singing. In follow-up experiments, they found that singers who performed a ritual exhibited fewer physical signs of anxiety (measured by heart rate); that rituals also helped people do better on a math test; and that telling the subjects they were doing a “ritual” led to better performance than if they did the exact same actions but called them “random gestures.”
Norton explains: “There seems to be something about rituals that in this context reduces anxiety and helps you do a little bit better.”
The experiments offer proof that rituals can cause better performances, but they don’t explain why. When Norton reflects on the research, particularly the study involving anxiety, he focuses on the distraction element of the ritual. “Perhaps rituals work not because they’re magically amazing, but they’re just better than what we usually do,” Norton says. This makes special sense if what we’d ordinarily do is worry—a pretty common activity before a big performance.
6.
According to union rules, an actor in a Broadway production cannot be required to arrive at the theater more than thirty minutes before a performance. Nevertheless, Belfast-born actress Laura Donnelly likes to show up several hours before the curtain. She needs time to shake off the bustle and noise of the Manhattan streets. She eats a relaxed takeout dinner in the theater, then takes off her shoes and, clad in a tracksuit, does yoga. She runs and jumps around backstage, limbering her muscles. Next is a series of vocal exercises, before she goes to her dressing room to don makeup and costume and meditate on the character she’ll be playing that night.
“I warm up the same way before any play. I have my set routine,” says Donnelly, who is best known for her role in the TV series Outlander and in movies such as The Program. The regimen hasn’t varied much since she learned it in drama school years ago.
But in the fall of 2014, when Donnelly starred alongside Hugh Jackman in the Broadway show The River, Donnelly was forced to put aside her traditional pre-performance routine and do something else instead.
Before each matinee and evening performance, the show’s director asked the show’s three actors, the stage manager, and one or two other key backstage personnel to form a circle in the theater’s lobby. Each night, the group would agree on a new category. Sometimes it involved something from the play; more often, it was something random, such as a type of tree, or a sexual position, or a cartoon character who is blue. Then one of the actors would take an American football, shout an example that fit the category (say, Papa Smurf!), and toss the football to the person directly across the circle, who’d then shout her word (Superman!), and toss the football onward. After the entire group had caught and thrown the football a few times, they’d choose a second category, and, with the football still making its rounds, start shouting a second set of words and tossing a tennis ball to each other. Often the circle would disintegrate as the cast moved around the lobby, the tosses growing longer, creating pressure to locate the intended target. “It got sillier and sillier. That was the charm of the game,” Donnelly says. “We’d usually end up falling down and laughing.”
After ten minutes or so of tossing balls, the group would re-form the circle and begin rhythmically clapping and telling a sequential story, with each person contributing two syllables and the next person picking up the semicoherent storyline.
When the show’s director first told Donnelly that he wanted her to incorporate the ball tossing into her preshow routine—supplanting some of her usual solo drills—she recalls being
slightly miffed. “It felt like I was being taken out of my ability to control how I warm up, and I guess I felt a little out of my comfort zone,” she says. Over time, her view shifted. “I began to realize that this was much more beneficial than my own personal warm-up,” she says. Donnelly recalls many other theatrical productions, with actors warming up individually, in which she’d find herself onstage reciting dialogue with a cast member to whom she hadn’t even had time to say “hello” before the curtain rose. “[The group ritual] was a really great way of reconnecting. It gave us such a sense of being one company, and a real camaraderie, that was really useful,” Donnelly says. “It’s something I’d be very keen to do with any company in the future.”
Ian Rickson, the show’s director, has never heard of Mike Norton nor his Harvard research, but after more than two decades of leading productions in the theaters of London and New York, he knows in his bones that group rituals make a big difference.
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