In “On Rituals,” I made a claim three separate times:
The waistcoat: for me, not the audience. The music: for me, not the audience. The opening line: gives me a launch pad, not them a warm welcome.
I was pretty insistent about it. Let’s dig a little deeper.
The Claim I Made #
The logic held up fine at the time, and I still believe the mechanism. Rituals create mental anchors. They reduce decision fatigue. They signal to your brain that it’s showtime. None of that requires an audience to be watching, let alone benefiting.
But here’s the thing I didn’t talk about: a ritual that changes your internal state doesn’t keep that change contained. You don’t button a waistcoat, feel the shift, and then walk on stage as a sealed unit. Whatever “the zone” does to you shows up in how you stand, how fast you talk, whether your eyes land on people or drift past them. The ritual is for you. The effects of the ritual are not necessarily only for you.
The Science I Almost Reused #
I could tell you this is backed by “enclothed cognition,” the idea that what you wear changes how you think. It’s tempting, because it’s the same territory as the waistcoat story, and the founding study is genuinely interesting: Adam and Galinsky found that people wearing a doctor’s lab coat made fewer errors on a Stroop test than people not wearing one [1].
I’m not going to lean on it, and I want to be upfront about why. A 2019 preregistered, high-powered replication attempt found no such effect [2]. Adam and Galinsky accepted that their specific finding was called into question, while arguing the broader idea still had legs [3]. A 2023 meta-analysis backed a soft version of that defense, finding that studies published from 2016 onward replicate at rates comparable to top science journals, which suggests the field cleaned up its act post-replication-crisis [4]. But the exact effect I’d want to cite, the one that would make a tidy callback to the rituals post, is the one that didn’t hold up. I already ran the “famous study, failed replication, principle survives anyway” play once in this series, with power posing. Running it twice in two posts isn’t rigor, it’s a tic. So I’m setting the clothing science aside and going after the part that’s actually well evidenced: what happens once your internal state becomes visible.
What Leaks Out #
In 1990, Judee Burgoon and colleagues had trained raters code 22 nonverbal behaviors, vocal, facial, postural, across videotaped speeches, then compared those codes against how audiences rated the speakers’ credibility and persuasiveness. The associations were consistent: composure and competence tracked with vocal and facial pleasantness, expressiveness tracked with perceived competence [5]. None of this required the audience to consciously notice anything. They just rated the speaker, and the ratings lined up with signals the speaker likely wasn’t managing on purpose.
That’s the mechanism your rituals actually plug into. Not audience persuasion by design, audience perception as a side effect of your own state. This assumes the ritual actually moved your state, which is last post’s claim, not one I’m re-proving here. If the waistcoat didn’t get you into the zone, none of what follows fires.
Where Congruence Comes In #
The word for what happens when those signals line up with your words is congruence, and the word for what happens when they don’t is a problem. Research on relational communication keeps landing on the same finding: the messages that define how an audience reads you, dominance, trust, composure, are carried heavily by nonverbal channels rather than by what you literally say [6]. So when your posture and tone say one thing and your words say another, the audience isn’t working from a neutral tie. The channel doing most of the relational work is the one contradicting your script, and that’s the one that tends to win.
Think about what that means for a nervous presenter reciting confident-sounding lines. The audience isn’t hearing confidence. They’re hearing the gap.
This is where Stroop actually earns its place in this post, not as a citation, but as a mental model. I set aside a Stroop study a few paragraphs ago for failing to replicate, so I’ll be precise: I’m borrowing the shape of the effect here, not its size. Nobody has to trust the milliseconds for the picture to hold. The Stroop effect is the delay you experience when the word “red” is printed in blue ink and you’re asked to name the ink color, not read the word. Your brain processes both channels automatically, and the conflict between them costs you time and effort. An audience watching a presenter whose verbal and nonverbal signals disagree is doing a version of that same reconciliation work, except nobody told them it was a task. It’s happening under the surface, and it’s expensive.
Why the Cost Matters #
Expensive processing isn’t neutral, it actively works against you. Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman built an entire research program around the finding that the more fluently people can process something, the more positively they respond to it, and fluency effects show up in judgments people aren’t even consciously attributing to ease of processing [7]. Flip that around: friction in processing doesn’t feel neutral, it costs you the audience’s goodwill. The retention cost is a separate, more mundane thing. If part of their attention is spent reconciling your words against your body language, that’s attention not spent on your content. You’re not fighting a fluency penalty there, you’re competing with yourself for a fixed pool of attention.
So the rituals aren’t decoration and they aren’t just self-care. When they work, they close the gap between what you’re saying and what your body is doing without you having to manage it consciously. When you skip them and step on stage running on nerves and caffeine, the gap doesn’t disappear, it becomes the audience’s problem to solve, and they solve it by trusting you less and remembering less of what you said.
That’s the rule as a first pass. It’s not the whole rule, and the exceptions are where it gets interesting.
Not All Incongruence Is Equal #
Here’s the obvious pushback: what if the incongruence is on purpose? Clown shoes with a business suit. Or the opposite problem, a small accident nobody meant, mismatched socks under the trousers.
These don’t work the same way, and lumping them in with the “gap between words and body” problem above would be a mistake. Judee Burgoon, the same researcher behind the credibility study, also built expectancy violations theory, which makes a counterintuitive claim: violating an audience’s expectations isn’t inherently costly. What matters is whether the violation reads as intentional and how much credibility you’d already banked going in [8]. Clown shoes at a keynote aren’t a mismatched signal fighting your message, they’re a legible choice. The audience isn’t reconciling two conflicting channels, they’re reading a joke. That only breaks down if they can’t tell whether it’s a bit or a mistake. Ambiguity is the expensive part, not the violation itself.
The socks are a different case again. Most of the time nobody notices, the mismatch is too minor to register as anything. On the rare occasion it does get noticed, there’s a decent chance it helps rather than hurts. Elliot Aronson’s pratfall effect found that a small, harmless blunder makes an already-competent person more likable, not less, because it humanizes them without threatening the competence they’ve already demonstrated [9]. The catch is it only works in that direction: you need the competence established first, and the blunder needs to stay minor and rare.
So the real dividing line isn’t congruent versus incongruent. It’s whether the audience can resolve what they’re seeing into one coherent read of you, and how cheaply. A gap they can’t explain costs you attention while they work it out. A gap they can explain, because you signaled it or because your track record covers it, doesn’t cost you anything, and sometimes it’s the thing that makes you memorable.
What Actually Works #
Don’t take this as license to build a costume. The audience isn’t grading your waistcoat. Two things are worth doing instead. First, treat your pre-performance ritual as a congruence check, not a performance: ask whether your voice, pace, and posture actually match your content, not whether you look the part. Second, if you’re inconsistent under pressure, don’t paper over it with confident-sounding phrasing. Fix the state, and the words will follow it, not the other way around.
I said my rituals aren’t for the audience. That’s still technically true. But the audience gets the benefit whether I intend it or not, and I’d rather understand why than take credit for something I didn’t design.
What signals do you think you’re sending without meaning to? I’d like to hear about it, so please reach out on LinkedIn or BlueSky.
References #
[1] Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 918-925. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.008
[2] Burns, D. M., Fox, E. L., Greenstein, M., Olbright, G., & Montgomery, D. (2019). An old task in new clothes: A preregistered direct replication attempt of enclothed cognition effects on Stroop performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83, 150-156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.10.001
[3] Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2019). Reflections on enclothed cognition: Commentary on Burns et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83, 157-159. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.12.002
[4] Horton, C. B., Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2023). Evaluating the evidence for enclothed cognition: Z-curve and meta-analyses. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231182478
[5] Burgoon, J. K., Birk, T., & Pfau, M. (1990). Nonverbal behaviors, persuasion, and credibility. Human Communication Research, 17(1), 140-169. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1990.tb00229.x
[6] Burgoon, J. K., & Hale, J. L. (1987). Validation and measurement of the fundamental themes of relational communication. Communication Monographs, 54(1), 19-41. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758709390214
[7] Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364-382. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
[8] Burgoon, J. K., & Hale, J. L. (1988). Nonverbal expectancy violations: Model elaboration and application to immediacy behaviors. Communication Monographs, 55(1), 58-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758809376158
[9] Aronson, E., Willerman, B., & Floyd, J. (1966). The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness. Psychonomic Science, 4(6), 227-228. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03342263
Photo by Metehan Demirkaya: https://www.pexels.com/photo/male-model-in-red-suit-9864149/