Party Psychology (WHY WE CELEBRATE) with Danielle Brick & Kelley Gullo-Wight

Rituals. Gatherings. Celebrations. Surprise parties. Weekend getaways. Campfires and birthday candles are in our DNA, and colleagues/social psychologists Dr. Danielle Brick & Dr. Kelley Gullo-Wight explain why. This conversation was like if you got seated at a dinner party next to two friends who study why we have dinner parties. We cover the neuroscience of anticipation, how much is too much for the ‘gram, a time machine to the middle ages, and how enjoying the good times together helps us weather our storms.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alie Ward?

  Oh, this is a special bonus episode of Ologies. It's brought to you by Verbo. I've loved making these bonus episodes. And today, we're talking about celebrations and rituals and the traditions that lead to these shared experiences. And this is whether it's making a toast, or taking annual vacations, or doing holiday traditions, even these small, repeated moments to look forward to, and how they have lasting psychological impacts way after the fact, how it affects you the rest of the year. It's scientifically different, and people study this, and they let me talk to them. And I've experienced that a lot myself by booking a Verbo and having fun with the people I love. And Verbo makes it easy to bring your people together in one place to create those traditions.

• 0:46Alie Ward?

  They work hard to get everything right before you arrive. And if something goes wrong, Verbo Care and their 24/7 support team are there to help. People on your trip are full of surprises, not your Verbo. Book your next day on the Verbo app. I have.

• 1:05Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey, it's your neighbor's cackling Halloween porch hag that scares you every time you walk the dog, Hallie Ward. And this is a bonus. It's a quick, fun one. And I mean, not scientifically, because it's about hanging out with your friends and your fam. So we have two guests for this one. They are, in fact, buddies. They're colleagues who both got their PhDs from Duke University, and they are consumer psychologists. So they look at close relationships between people and how we make decisions. So all the time, we're consuming everything, from books to granola bars and subway tokens and TikToks and Air. And the people around us influence how we spend our time and our money, and that impacts our wellbeing.

• 1:50Alie Ward?

  So this conversation was like, if you got seated at a dinner party next to two friends who study why we have dinner parties, I loved every second. So let's meet them.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  One, Danielle Brick. She/her.

• 2:02Alie Ward?

  Is a professor in the marketing department at University of Connecticut. She has bright, wide eyes, beachy blonde waves, and was wearing a white blouse. And the other guest.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Kelly Gulliwright. She/her.

• 2:15Alie Ward?

  Is a behavioral professor at Indiana University's Kelly School of Business. And she hopped on the call with a curly corkscrew bob and a pinstripe suit jacket and a very sweet smile. So it was surreal meeting them because I had been learning on their work from afar, particularly this 2023 paper, "Celebrate Good Times: How Celebrations Increase Perceived Social Support", which, number one, we love a Cool in the Gang reference, but also, it was about why humans gather to have fun. So the fact that they made time for me already felt like a party. And we're going to get to it in just a minute first, but thank you to patrons of the show at patreon.com/ologies. And thanks to listeners who leave reviews, which help the show so much.

• 2:59Alie Ward?

  And yeah, I do read them all. And yes, thank you, Selvin7, who called the show "Strange, Beautiful, and Endlessly Fascinating". And I wish this one was endless, but yes, sadly, it's just a quick, shorter bonus episode. So let's get right to it, into what defines a celebration, what rituals have to do with it, why birthday candles are written into your DNA, toasting to the bad times, the science of anticipation, how much is too much for the gram, a time machine, back to the Middle Ages, please, and how weathering the good times is part of surviving the storms, with researchers, professors, behavior scientists, and, in effect, party psychologists,

• 3:44Alie Ward?

  Dr. Kelly Gulliwright and Dr. Danielle Brick.

• 4:06Alie Ward?

  You study celebrations. You co-authored a paper on it. First off, did you celebrate it when it came out?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:16Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  We did. Anytime we have anything go well, we make a point. And we highly recommend everybody should do that. Like, biggest takeaway is celebrate everything, anything you can.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so we find a reason to have a toast, to celebrate every time.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Growing up, there was a running joke when I was earlier in my twenties about how I felt like celebrations, birthdays, needed to last a month. You need to really embrace that. And then in grad school, I was very fortunate to take classes with some esteemed, incredible psychology professors. But I was able to take social psychology classes. And I saw that there was really fascinating work about how people were communicating about positive life events, and how communicating and sharing verbally positive life events led to positive outcomes for the individual and the relationship, and had sequentially positive downstream consequences.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  And being a consumer psychologist, I started thinking about, well, what about consumption to help mark and highlight these positive life events? So the idea of celebrations being a very popular, important way in which we say, hey, look, this is something meaningful that happened, and connecting with other people around it, and building upon that event, and creating these relationship and social experiences, amplify that positive event, which then contribute to perceived social support for mental health, physical health, reduce morbidity, mortality rates, and just really understanding how these things all connect together. That's where it started.

• 5:53Alie Ward?

  And when you talk about consumption, what does that mean? Does that mean like, okay, you're gonna get candles, you're gonna get party hats? Or is that partly psychological?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So it can be actually sitting around, eating, drinking. But it could be something like going to a concert. It could be one that involves some Ash pit or not.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Let's go.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Depends upon your personal preference or not. But it's beyond just actual food. It's more of these consumer-type experiences, which I think is also what makes it really interesting.

• 6:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  I thought it was so interesting that it's really hard to think of a ritual or a celebration that doesn't involve eating, or food, or something, some kind of shared consumption experience, right? Birthday parties, holidays.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  You know, you get the promotion. It feels weird.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  You don't have to toast alcohol, but you toast something.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Something.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Right?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Or cake, or you, there's something.

• 6:49Alie Ward?

  Do you just live by the Julia Child, like, "Party without a cake is just a meeting"? Have you heard that quote?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  No, that's amazing. I'm going to from now on, man.

• 6:59Alie Ward?

  She had it right, man.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  She definitely did.

• 7:01Alie Ward?

  So yeah, there is always something that you want to consume together.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  You know, I think there's these kind of rituals, these scripts we have around celebrating. In this research, we find that it matters that you're doing social consumption to mark some kind of positive, separate event. But at its core, it kind of comes down to, you know, having something shared together, showing up for each other.

• 7:22Alie Ward?

  Did you ever have to go down rabbit holes in terms of history? Everything from, you know, luas to medieval cheersing and things like that? Like, how far back does that history go?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  So when I started the project, I did do some research back on the history. I just think of like jousting beers, toasting big, like, drumstick legs. But what I did find was that a lot of the current practices, traditions around celebrations sort of evolved around the turn of the 20th century. And it happened where the changing in the society, culture, brought about these traditions, embedded them, and those continued on through the roaring twenties, which, of course, we also think about consumption, probably with drinks and Great Gatsby, and the celebration of life, maybe, as opposed to an individual-specific event,

• 8:21Speaker 01

  but maybe at a more cultural or societal level. And then the depression happened. But what I found in my research was that small businesses helped keep the economy or restore the economy, and small businesses relied on celebrations in their marketing and creating communications around holidays and rituals, and this notion of still having things to look forward to as a way to bond.

• 8:47Alie Ward?

  We have so many rituals around the holidays and so many feasts. And, you know, in the US, it might be a turkey, and it might be haggis in other places.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 8:59Alie Ward?

  They seem to have roots also in religious traditions, from like Mardi Gras cakes and finding a baby in there, which is weird, but okay.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:11Alie Ward?

  Seasonal traditions. Did we kind of base it on religious rituals? And then it became more just cultural, like, hey, it's been a month since we had a party. Labor Day it is, you know?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:24Alie Ward?

  Arbor Day, let's throw a little Halloween in there.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  I think it's hard to, I would imagine, differentiate, if you imagine.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  I was gonna say chicken and egg.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, breaking bread and this idea of those going together, which then translate into stories and embedded within the religion. Exactly. I sort of see those as going together.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  There's this long tradition of thinking of, you know, breaking bread, as Danielle said, like, eating and shared consumption together as companionship, right? I think that's the root of the word companionship is Latin, right? Like, bread.

• 9:59Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Panis.

• 10:01Alie Ward?

  What?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah. No.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:05Alie Ward?

  Sit up. I never thought, I love etymology, but that is nuts. That's so fun. So yes, I'm still freaking out about this companionship. Come, panis.

• 10:20Alie Ward?

  Stop it. It just means with bread or bread fellow. So companions, we are all just sticking together like a couple of weasels sharing a slice of pizza and eating stuff and laughing just goes way back, further than the Industrial Revolution and to our hairier ancestors. So somewhere in the middle of that is in fact medieval ragers. And I had seen a meme a few years back about how medieval peasants worked only 150 days of the year and that modern humans, yes, work more than stallmuckers of yore in tattered burlap. But hey, we do have electricity and that's gotta be good for our mental wellbeing, right? Well, more on that in a minute.

• 11:05Alie Ward?

  But I did go and I fact-checked that 150 days a year. And truth be told, it is hard to estimate who worked how much because record-keeping was a little spotty without time clocks and Excel drives. But when it comes down to it, many historians agree that 150 days a year, that figure was probably right, give or take. And when wages were higher, many chose to work fewer hours and just spend more time chilling. Some churches even mandated two weeks from labor around the Christmas holidays. But for every tale of snoozing in a haystack, there's also just egregious acts of labor exploitation

• 11:48Alie Ward?

  and human cruelty in the name of commerce and different religions. But speaking of which, while holiday does come from holy day, celebrating and merriment predates the church. So celebrations seem to fall in seasonal patterns across time and cultures. So harvest celebrations to mark the bounty, winter feasts to pull us through the cold or dark times, the renewal celebrations of spring, the start of summer pops off. And then these cycles and then many more that are written in the stars and the new moons have always been outlets, anthropologists say, for people to blow off some steam and then just get cozy with their friends and their neighbors.

• 12:32Alie Ward?

  Because we would all be dead if we didn't like each other and watch out for each other and share stuff.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  It's hard to know where it starts, right? You can imagine going all the way back to hunters, gatherers. Food is a shared resource. It's where we all come together. It serves as social glue, I think, in a lot of ways. And I think it's natural that a lot of our very meaningful traditions, and whether it's religious or not, is gonna center around this kind of shared resource. And we see that in our daily life, right? People will wait to eat until we can all eat together. We'll center our celebrations around it, right? Like when we talk about Thanksgiving, yeah, we're giving thanks, but you brought up the turkey. When we think about the holidays, it's often around the food that we're gonna share, birthdays cake or some kind of shared experience.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  You know, we're gonna go to a concert or we'll do something to mark this occasion or to do something together.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  To your point, food does play a role, but it doesn't have to be only food. If you have a trip or a vacation that's around some positive life event, many people go on trips for birthdays or for holidays. And so there's also buying airplane tickets or renting a place to stay or finding the perfect location to have your celebration. All of that is also really important and I think embedded in our culture and keeps us happy and excited and having things to look forward to and really builds our self-esteem and all these positive, really great things.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  We have something, some kind of shared experience, things to talk about, things to do together. It's not just, oh, we're gonna like sit in the room. We're also gonna play board games.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's another great one.

• 14:20Alie Ward?

  Absolutely ferocious, ferocious board games. Yes. And yes, science can be fun and fun can be science. And again, one of their academic papers, which was published in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, is "Celebrate Good Times: How Celebrations Increase Perceived Social Support." So let's crack into the definitions and then the findings. You know, reading a book on something is one thing, but reading a peer-reviewed paper in a journal on this stuff is so exciting. How did you define a celebration versus a ritual? When it came to the core terms, how do you figure that out?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  So celebrations can have rituals, but not all rituals are celebrations, I think is how we think about it and how we've talked about it. There are aspects that have ritual features, the script, the schema. You walk in, you sort of know what to expect, so that helps to create some of the ease and the excitement around celebrations. But there doesn't have to be a specific ritual. It could be spur of the moment. It could be planned out.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Special occasion? Or ritual is really just a shared script, right? And it doesn't have to be celebratory script. We have scripts for all kinds of things, but we do have a lot of rituals around celebrations.

• 15:42Alie Ward?

  So a ritual is something done following a tradition or a custom. And that's not always a celebration. A celebration is an event to mark an occasion, usually enjoyable, at least in theory. Depending on if your two middle-aged cousins throw hands at the reunion because one of them got the cigarettes wet on the rafting trip. But even that was enjoyable from afar and then they made up like 10 minutes later. A great reunion. The tension fades, but the memories don't. But what is the architecture of a celebration? Because it's actually not a cake. And also that quote, as it turns out, was not verifiably said by Julia Child, even though so many cross-stitch pillows would have you and me sadly believe otherwise.

• 16:26Alie Ward?

  I love that there's like three core touchstones of what makes a celebration. Can you walk me through that and how you decided? Did you have to pare it down from like 17 and to three?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Ah, yes. There's a lot of research, especially with social support, on how perceived social support in response to a negative life event is extremely important. Not as much has looked at responses to positive life events. So that's number one, positive life event. And then we really being relationship experts is the importance of the social dynamic was really important as well because you could have a positive life event and you could mark it, but you could do that by yourself. You don't necessarily have to have other people. But to get the benefits on perceived social support, the social aspect was key.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  And then the third is consumption that can amplify, enhance and build upon the experience to lead to those positive outcomes downstream. Those are the three.

• 17:29Alie Ward?

  So that's an event to mark. There's a social aspect to it. And you're gathering and using something to celebrate it, whether that's just time spent or making a daisy chain flower crown in the park or maybe pass around some Rice Krispie treats or go into a cabin for your anniversary. So how did they, as social scientists, quantify or qualify this fun?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  And we had a lot of conversations around, you know, each of these dimensions, positive, separate event and social consumption. We are also really systematic in testing each of these things. We find that really we need all three in combination to kind of get this boost to perceived social support. But there's lots of instances in life where you just have one or two or maybe even none of these elements, right? Imagine a negative life event, a funeral.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Bummer.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  We're still gathering. We're still getting together. We're marking this person's life. Maybe we're even celebrating their life, right? We could frame it that way. And often after services, we gather as a group. And you know, maybe you have sandwiches, maybe you have a toast, right? There's some kind of social consumption happening.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Actually, sounds kind of nice.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  And there's this really interesting finding across the social support literature and that, you know, this idea that social support resources are the belief that others will be there for you when things go wrong. And that's really important, having these resources, believing that people will be there. But when something actually does go wrong, there's really mixed effects about whether it has positive outcomes for you, right? Like when our social support network actually comes and enacts support for negative events, that can be really awkward.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Because it's so difficult when something goes wrong, a funeral, to be able to connect and enact support successfully, whereas positive life events are much easier because some of the scripts, some of the things and the positive emotions that are already going on.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And so it's showing up for the positive life events in each other's lives that allow us to build these, these resources so we have them when, when things do go bad. We ran studies on this, right? We had people compare thinking about a time when you marked a positive or negative life event. Maybe you got the promotion or maybe you were fired, right? You can, we don't have to go death. We can think of.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  We don't have to go death today. Not today.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  We can think of, you know, more common daily negative occurrences, but often we will go together and we'll support our friends when something poorly goes on at work or when something positive goes on. And so we ran studies trying to compare these two different situations and we only saw a boost on perceived social support when it was positive. And certainly, I don't think the takeaway is don't support people when things go bad, but the takeaway is also support them when things go well.

• 20:23Alie Ward?

  Do people just showing up, do they kind of have this script running for you then that if shit hits a fan, like you can rely on these people because they were there to celebrate the good times too?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  I think that's kind of the thesis of this paper.

• 20:41Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Is this idea that by showing up for these positive life events and creating this shared experience together, making this one, you know, one person's positive life event, a promotion, a birthday, whatever, turning it into a shared positive between, you know, the whole group, not just the person who's celebrating, but everybody at that celebration, we find gets a boost to their perceived social support resources. So whether you're organizing it for your friend, whether you're just attending, it becomes this shared experience together. We're showing all of us how responsive we can be.

• 21:16Alie Ward?

  Just a side note, I'd never watched the series Yellowjackets before, but I just finished season one. And because I've been working on this episode, I'm watching things so differently. Like I noticed when the girls were bonding by dancing around or feasting on bear meat or putting on makeup and drinking berry wine to, let's say, lift some spirits. Now, as animals, if there were never any good times, why would we fight to live through the bad ones? I mean, it's dark, but it's in our evolution.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So to some extent, I would say bring on the fair weather friends. And then also the value Kelly just alluded to this of organizing for somebody else. We also found positives in that too. So it doesn't even have to be your positive event. You organizing a birthday or something for someone else can also have these positive impacts.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Although we did find that there's less positive effects if you're organizing your own birthday.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:13Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:14Alie Ward?

  Yes. Oh, I was just talking about this.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:19Alie Ward?

  I've said it before, I'm going to say it one more time. If you have someone with a big event coming up, just offer to help them plan it, even just asking them questions to narrow down what they really want helps so much and it makes it collaborative. Friends don't let friends plan their entire birthday without offering to help.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  And it's not harmful, but you don't get as, as good of a boost.

• 22:41Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  As when someone else organizes for you.

• 22:43Alie Ward?

  How about surprise parties? How do you feel about surprise parties as scholars of celebrations?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Love them. All for those as well. Love them. Surprise away.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Danielle and I have some other research together on secrecy. And recently we've been working on, it's not published yet, we've been working on a conceptual, kind of theoretical piece about secrecy with our collaborator Veronica Thomas. And we've been having so many conversations about the role of secrecy in celebrations, right? In gift giving, there's a huge chunk of giving a gift where it's a secret.

• 23:17Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Surprise parties, like we're, we're creating all these secrets. And even just a party that's not a surprise, there's often some kind of surprise element, right? It's a secret that so and so is coming. It's a secret that we're going to have a slideshow or, or whatever. And secrecy adds enhanced meaning, right?

• 23:37Alie Ward?

  Well, you know, I've, I've read that gossip can be really destructive, but it can also bond people. But if you're gossiping about like, okay, I think that they would like this, that seems like a cute form of gossip. Like if you're going to talk behind someone's back, the idea of being like, okay, you land at 4:30, we're going to get you to the, like, that's so cute. I don't know why that just jazzes me up. I think that's really adorable. And for more on this, you can read their 2022 paper, Secret Consumer Behaviors in Close Relationships, which was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, which essentially found that what Danielle calls small scale secrets or minor transgressions in close relationships, like sneaking a candy bar on the way home, even though you're having

• 24:22Alie Ward?

  dinner together. Ultimately, those draw people closer because the guilt makes them behave more pro socially as a relationship investment to make sure that the bond is still strong. Likewise, being in on a surprise for another person can bond a group together. And just on keeping with the pro-social behavior, this week, both doctors pointed us in the direction of good causes and were donating to two charities and their names. The first is Middleway House, which supports individuals affected by domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. And it works to end those incidents and to meet the specific housing, employment, and service needs of survivors and their children. Great cause.

• 25:05Alie Ward?

  You can find out more at middlewayhouse.org. And then another donation is going to rosiesplace.org, which is a multi-service community center. It offers women emergency shelter and meals. They have a food pantry, language classes, legal assistance, wellness care, one-on-one support. They also have housing and job search services and community outreach. That's rosiesplace.org. So both of those causes, middlewayhouse.org as well, are linked in the show notes. Thank you so much to Verbo for sponsoring today's episode and making it possible for us to donate to causes of theologist choosing. And I've loved doing this one because I learned just how powerful rituals can be because

• 25:48Alie Ward?

  they give us the sense of continuity and connection, but also that planning and that time spent together really bonds us. And a lot of those rituals too are tied to a place of going somewhere together and experiencing things together and planning it ahead of time and having something to look forward to, or just creating new traditions in a new space. That is why group travel can become such an important part of people's lives. It's something that anthropologically scientists know that we need. And Verbo helps make those traditions possible by giving you a space to gather year after year, whether it's cooking together, celebrating something, or just spending time in the same place.

• 26:31Alie Ward?

  They also help reduce the stress that can come with planning group trips. They focus on getting everything right ahead of time. And if something unexpected happens, Verbo care and 24/7 support are there to help. So you can focus on the traditions that you're building and you can find your next day on the Verbo app. Okay, so we're back and this is a short bonus episode. We didn't have space for listener questions, but a huge question I had, and you might as well, is in all of this talk of consumerism, what is too much? And in her book, Plenitude, The New Economics of True Wealth, economist and sociologist Dr. Juliet Shore, pinpoints what matters most in the leisure that we're seeking, what is worth investing in.

• 27:16Alie Ward?

  And that's a shift toward elements like nature and community and fostering, learning, and spending time. And the brain derives pleasure and renewal from experiences and memories and bonding. But how far is too far? What about around weddings? Is there a point where things get so, like maybe a little off the rail? I feel like in the last year, this notion of a bachelorette party has to be really aesthetic and really impressive in two dimensions for the people who weren't there and like maybe losing sight of, are we having a good time?

• 27:57Alie Ward?

  Or is there like a spreadsheet that's like, everyone has to be in a pink bikini and da, da, da, da, da, da, you know? Where's the line where you're like, okay, too much consumption?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  I think it's also raising the interesting point about, you know, social media's effect on these aspects that initially are largely intended to be in person, in the moment, experienced in real time versus creating this secondary aspect to it and how, that's extremely interesting, how that could change. Recalling the day, the experiences during the day, if you're like, we all have to be in this pink bikini and we're not actually enjoying this time together because you're so focused on creating this image.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Taking the same picture pose over and over and over.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Over and over, and you're, you're removing all of the actual beneficial aspects. That's fascinating.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Well, it kind of comes down to, are we enacting support for each other? Are we being responsive to each other in the moment? And food and celebration is our way of doing that. But as soon as we are layering on these kind of traditions and rituals that are taking away from this focal, shared interaction, and it's about people who aren't there, I think it starts to break it a little bit. I think there's a lot of traditions and norms that we've start to build, like rituals around some of these things that are maybe not strictly necessary. I have some research on gift giving, and what we find is gift givers are so focused on getting the perfect gift, right? There's lots of research on this, like it needs to be new, it needs to be perfectly priced, it needs to be all of these things.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  And really, people just want the gift. Like, they want to know they were thought of. The receivers don't care. We get so caught up in what we need to be doing, that in, you know, sometimes these rituals can get in the way, or these traditions behind the, the core of what matters, right? When we're doing the bachelorette, it's about all of us being together, celebrating our friendship and, you know, bringing our friend into this next chapter of life, all of these things. But if we're too focused on, on the other stuff, I agree, it, it takes it away a little bit.

• 30:06Alie Ward?

  And again, a celebration and a social gathering can happen around a few glasses of water, or as many anthropologists can tell you, some firelight. So there was this fascinating 2014 paper titled, "Embers of Society: Firelight Talk Among the Zhu Huanxi Bushmen," and it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and it analyzed dozens of conversations of South African bushmen and found that around firelight, night activities steer away from tensions of the day into singing, dancing, religious ceremonies, and enthralling stories, often about people that everyone knows.

• 30:49Alie Ward?

  And night talk, it says, plays an important role in evoking higher orders of theory of mind via the imagination and generating cooperation and trust. And of course, it notes that as a species, we share this widespread human use of firelight for this intimate conversation and to satiate this appetite for evening stories. And the author delivers such a stunning portrait of human interaction, just rendered in this flickering illumination, and leaves us with, "The question is raised as to what happens when economically unproductive firelit time is turned into productive time by artificial lighting?"

• 31:34Alie Ward?

  And what happens is, you're always working to make money, or you're trying to relax by making other people money while you scroll, billionaires get richer. It's horsepucky, frankly, and that's not what we've evolved to do or care about. I mean, no wonder why everyone's tired and lonely. So yeah, gather around campfires, light a birthday candle, even the smallest little flame can do something.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  And you said kinship earlier, and all of these pieces that helped us form society and communities that could help each other. Yeah, for sure.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  And I think that's evident in how we see these very common, you know, shared consumption practices and celebrations and things across cultures.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  It's not just in the US that we're, we're doing this.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  It's not just in, you know, kind of the Western world, quote unquote. It's everywhere. We gather around food, we gather around these kind of shared experiences, and if we're seeing something that spans cultures that pervasively, that suggests to me that we're rooted in something far deeper.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, New Year's Eve as a celebration and the worldwide aspect of it, and watching it turn across all parts is a great example of how it is culturally connecting.

• 32:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah, any other traditions culturally that surprised you or that were like, oh, that's a great idea? You know, my friend Simone, she's Swedish, and she, every year for her birthday, Swedish tradition, you make a cake in the shape of something or decorated with something really cool that happened that year, that to mark the year. And one year she got a, she got sprayed by a skunk, we made her a skunk cake that had like a, that had like a easy cheese, cheese whiz.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:21Alie Ward?

  On the butt, you could press a cheese whiz. She got a, she got a car, she got an honorary doctorate, so we made a laurel wreath cake. She adopted a dog, we made her a cake that was shaped like her dog with coconut flakes on the top. So every year, it's like, okay, what are we going to do for Simone? And I just think, I was like, that's so cool that people do that in Sweden. And after about the third or fourth year, we were talking about it, and she's like, oh, they don't do this in Sweden, this is just a weird thing I like. And I was like, oh my god.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  I love that, and looking at all the effort and thought and how you're highlighting all these events and being part of it, I love that.

• 33:59Alie Ward?

  For years, though, I was like, oh, that's interesting.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  That's so funny.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  That's amazing. I sort of wish, bringing it back to the secrecy, she hadn't even told you that, and she just kept letting, letting you think it was part of the culture.

• 34:13Alie Ward?

  I just assumed, I was like, I mean, at the end of the day, what do you have but those memories and that bonding?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes.

• 34:24Alie Ward?

  Even if something goes wrong, you can still like laugh about it, or, you know, I remember one of my fondest memories is horrible from my 40th birthday, as my friend Ailin showed up with like balloons, it was so sweet, she was the first person there, and immediately, something happened, the knot slipped, and the balloons just floated into the ether. It was like five minutes into it, but we laughed about it a lot, and like, that's like a memory from my birthday that's indelible, just because it was like, oh, at the time, it was really funny. So I don't know, I think sometimes these, these rituals, it's more what you experience together than does it go perfectly? Do you know what I mean?

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. And it kind of goes back to this idea of, we don't have to make it perfect, right? These rituals give us a basic script, but we don't have to follow it precisely, right? It doesn't have to be a perfect Instagrammable.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Birthday party?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yes, it's almost better if it isn't.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Exactly. The whole goal is to have something that we can share, and all of a sudden, it becomes not just your birthday, but a shared thing we all have. And then, that's something we can look forward to going into it, it's something we can enjoy in the moment, and it's something we can talk about and kind of build into our relationship and the story of, you know, our friendship and our relationships and our life afterwards. It's okay if we break the script a little bit. The goal is to get together in a meaningful way.

• 35:49Alie Ward?

  And I've been so excited to get this aside all episode, because there was a 2018 study published in Frontiers of Psychology titled, "Wellbeing and Anticipation for Future Positive Events: Evidencees from an fMRI Study." So anticipating anticipation. It noted previous research dating back a few decades that suggested that anticipation has really important implications in human wellbeing and in our mental health, and that thinking in the future has important evolutionary benefits. We have to be able to imagine what's going to happen, right? And it also cites earlier studies that people who are more anxious tend to anticipate

• 36:29Alie Ward?

  more negative future experiences, whereas people with depression tend to anticipate fewer positive experiences. So people with depression don't necessarily anticipate negative events, that's for the anxious people, just a lack of positive ones.

• 36:45Speaker 05

  Like, generally speaking.

• 36:47Alie Ward?

  If any of this sounds too familiar, listen up. So anticipating positive events increases something called reward sensitivity in the brain, and that helps boost a positive mood, and it leads to higher levels of mental wellbeing, which also helps with stress coping and also helps with physical wellbeing. So, to prove it, these researchers put 40 people in functional MRI machines to see their brains anticipating good stuff, and they watched the brains light up in the bilateral medial prefrontal cortex. That's an area that is associated with higher wellbeing, the study says. So since I did this interview and this episode, I keep thinking all the time, like, am I

• 37:32Alie Ward?

  anticipating a bad result? Am I anxious? Can I tweak that thought and imagine a better outcome? Or am I bummed? Am I depressed? Am I even looking forward to anything? And then I try to think of three things that I'm looking forward to, from like tomorrow morning's cup of tea to going to a perfume counter to sniff some stuff for free, or a pie baking contest that's happening in two months, anything. Think of anything you can look forward to. Scientists have worked so hard to tell you that it helps. Also, doctors, heal thyselfs.

• 38:09Alie Ward?

  Is there anything, any ritual that y'all are looking forward to this year, or any holidays, or favorite days, or anniversaries, or birthdays, or dissertation anniversaries that you, you guys are looking forward to?

• 38:24Speaker 02

  I just had one, I'm not looking forward to it anymore, it just happened, but one of my best friends, my roommate from undergrad, just got married, and that was so much fun, right? A bunch of our college friends got together, a bunch of us were in the wedding, we got to celebrate not just our friend and her new husband and their relationship, but it was so fun to just be together, right? We did this whole trip together, we were all staying together. I think that was my big one for the years, is celebrating my friend and all the rituals that go along with it. Not everything went perfect, but I think it was a perfect wedding.

• 38:58Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. I was just going to say, at the end of the day, it's really less about like, are the napkins the exact color of sage, or did the groom's brother do the worm on the dance floor? And what do you, what do you remember?

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there was, there was maybe like a kerfuffle around the, the flowers, like, are the flowers going to show up? And we're like, okay, we'll just run to Trader Joe's, like, well, if we have to get a bunch of flowers, we'll get a bunch of flowers, we're going to have this great wedding. And the flowers showed up, they were beautiful, the wedding was beautiful, but ultimately, you know, the memories aren't about the flowers, the memories about all celebrating together, right?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:34Alie Ward?

  And Danielle, you were going to say your son's birthday?

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Is Friday, and he loves mini golfing, and this will be our third year going mini golfing on his birthday, and I am actually excited about it. And it's just like a very low key, but it'll be a fun little thing that will be our ritual, I'm realizing, so I'm excited about that.

• 39:55Alie Ward?

  Is he good at it?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yes, he is. Yes. He is turning eight and he is better at already a lot of sports than I am.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Like, we went when he was maybe six.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  And he was better at mini golf than I was. So I imagine he's still very good.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 40:14Alie Ward?

  That's so great. Oh, my gosh. This has just been really affirming in terms of get goofy, get together, celebrate, bigger, small.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:25Alie Ward?

  I think it really does matter. And it's really heartening to know that when you're there for the good times, it helps during the bad times, too.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 40:36Alie Ward?

  It gives me like butterflies to celebrate things. That's so sweet and great. So keep up the amazing work. It's so cool that someone gets to study this, and it's y'all.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  It is, yes.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Oh, it's so fun.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  It's amazing. Yes, it is the best job. I'm very grateful to be able to ask these questions and do this research and look at these exciting and important things.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  And also benefit from it. I've tried so hard to integrate celebrations more into my daily life.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  And I think I'm better off for it. It's a great way to live.

• 41:11Alie Ward?

  So ask festive people your festering questions because what's the point of anything if you can't enjoy something? So thank you, Danielle and Kelly, so much for agreeing to let me ask you so many questions. And please do find out more about them and their causes of choice this week, right in the show notes. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and on Instagram, and I'm at @AllyWard, one L on both. We have shorter, kid-friendly episodes. They're in their own feed, wherever you get podcasts. Thank you, as always, to supporters at Patreon.com/Ologies for supporting the show from the very beginning. We'll be back, of course, on Tuesday with regular episodes. And thanks to Erin Talbert, who admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

• 41:56Alie Ward?

  Kelly Ardwire does the website. Spending quality time is scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth. Social and occupational support comes via managing director Susan Hale. Bonding together all the clips and the cuts are editors Jake Chaffee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn gifted us with this theme music. And if you stick around to the very, very end, I'll tell you a secret. And this is one of my favorite birthday candle traditions. I feel like it started around quarantine. And then as people were coming out of quarantine, it felt super weird to watch someone like blow on their candles on a cake. Everyone's like, ugh, it's like too soon for that. So what I started doing, instead of one person having to blow out a ton of candles

• 42:41Alie Ward?

  and either have an asthma attack or spread germs everywhere, everyone gets a candle, it gets lit, and then everyone makes a wish for the person who's having a birthday and blows it out at the same time. So that person gets like 20 wishes from various friends who are wishing good things. Nobody spits on any cakes. I know I'm talking about this too much, but I'm just saying it's, I think it's a beautiful thing to say, hey, everyone, make a wish for me, will ya? Make it something good. I think that's a great idea. If you don't like it, you don't have to do it. Happy birthday. Okay, bye-bye.

• 43:34Speaker 06

  I am fun, and it's been scientifically proven.

• 43:39Alie Ward?

  Thank you again so much to Verbo for sponsoring today's special episode. I was so stoked to find the two best people to talk to about this, about creating meaning over time, and also the social support that brings warmth to not only your good times, but bonding and support that sustains us all year, even the rough times. And the investment of traveling and enjoying these shared traditions is literally good for your health and the health of the people you love. You deserve it. Your ancestors agree. 300,000 years of gathering over rituals and traditions, whether it's under a new moon or it's your yearly holiday 2,000-piece puzzle, it's a form of medicine. It's also fun.

• 44:21Alie Ward?

  And Verbo helps support these moments with a reliable place to stay and support when you need it. The people on your trip are full of surprises. Not your Verbo. Book your next trip on the Verbo app. Yay.