Researchers Cristine Legare and Andre Souza have a 2013 article that examines how rituals help people cope with randomness in the world — and their own loss of control. This article, in Cognitive Science, is Searching for Control: Priming Randomness Increases the Evaluation of Ritual Efficacy.
The abstract:
Reestablishing feelings of control after experiencing uncertainty has long been considered a fundamental motive for human behavior. We propose that rituals (i.e., socially stipulated, causally opaque practices) provide a means for coping with the aversive feelings associated with randomness due to the perception of a connection between ritual action and a desired outcome. Two experiments were conducted (one in Brazil [n = 40] and another in the United States [n = 94]) to evaluate how the perceived efficacy of rituals is affected by feelings of randomness. In a between‐subjects design, the Scramble Sentence Task was used as a priming procedure in three conditions (i.e., randomness, negativity, and neutral) and participants were then asked to rate the efficacy of rituals used for problem‐solving purposes. The results demonstrate that priming randomness increased participants’ perception of ritual efficacy relative to negativity and neutral conditions. Implications for increasing our understanding of the relationship between perceived control and ritualistic behavior are discussed.
Some of the these instrumental, control-perception rituals include college students’ pre-exam rituals, athletes’ pre-game rituals, and fishermen in New Guinea fishing.
The authors propose that rituals are used to give people a much-needed illusion of control, to deal with anxieties and feelings of powerlessness.
We hypothesize that ritual is used for instrumental purposes to maintain an illusion of control. An illusion of control (Langer, 1975) occurs when people believe or respond as if contingencies between their behavior and the outcome exist, even if the outcomes are random (Alloy, Abramson, & Viscusi, 1981; Matute, 1994). Rituals, which we define as conventional, causally opaque procedures may provide a means for coping with the aversive feelings associated with randomness by reestablishing feelings of control. In line with prior work on reasoning about ritual efficacy (Legare & Souza, 2012), we propose that the structure of ritual can be interpreted in light of intuitive causal beliefs about the efficacy of action (e.g., repetition and number of procedural steps) and not content familiarity with culturally specific rituals.
Actions vary along a continuum ranging from highly efficacious to neutral (e.g., placebo) to harmful (e.g., bloodletting). Where do most rituals lie on this continuum? Perhaps close to zero in actual efficacy. But if things like number of procedural steps and repetition are generally linked with more efficacious actions (Legare & Souza, 2012), rituals may parasitize elements that are statistically linked with more causally efficacious practices.
Despite the fact that engaging in causally opaque practices may seem to be a paradoxical means of increasing perceived control, we hypothesize that this is possible because rituals provide a socially stipulated and culturally sanctioned opportunity to exert agency through actions with the potential for causal efficacy, thereby giving the illusion of increased control (Kay et al., 2008; Thompson, Armstrong, & Thomas, 1998). Priming randomness increases the activation of attributional biases to detect a connection between action and outcome as a means of reestablishing feelings of control. The perception of a connection also increases the evaluation of ritual efficacy.
The rituals they designed were short, non-sensical experiments:
