In the article, they link to multiple papers they've written on the topic of rituals, as well as quantify their results in the experiment they performed:
"About 58% of the participants in our ritual condition chose the carrot over the chocolate, as compared to only about 35% of those in the control condition and 46% of those in the random-gestures condition."
As the article is in the magazine's "Behavior & Society" section the science in the article seems cogent.
The definition of the word: "make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, especially with trivial matters"
Still not seeing the magical connotation; seems pretty well grounded in human behavior, which is topical for Scientific American.
Wait.... what? Are you talking about Harry Potter?
It's hard to tell if you started as serious but are now becoming a parody troll account.
If you look up a linguistics corpus like the Corpus of Contemporary American English [2] or the British National Corpus [3] -- visit those sites, search for "vexing", and click on "VEXING" again -- you'll see a representative set of usages of the word "in the wild", and none of them appear to have anything to do with magic. There's also something in C++ called the "most vexing parse" [4], which too doesn't seem to have anything to do with magic. (By the way, you may like to try this exercise with "ritual" too, to see how the word is used in practice.)
[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/vexin...
[2]: https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
>And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.
[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+15%3A22...
It is deep in the literature that vexation is a domain of devils.
Begone, you.
>Begone, you.
Not very welcoming around here?
Then there's the academic definition, covered elsewhere in this thread.
Shaking hands with everyone before starting a meeting is a ritual.
Tucking your kid into bed is a ritual.
Repeated event, but presumably done for your benefit.
>Shaking hands with everyone before starting a meeting is a ritual.
Not usually done in most corporate meetings I've been to.
>Tucking your kid into bed is a ritual.
I suppose it could be, but I guess I'm not sure what you mean by 'ritual' anymore.