What magical language are you opposed to? The term "ritual" is pretty well defined: "Rituals are series of steps we take while attaching some kind of symbolic meaning."
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.
'Ritual' can be used in religious or magical contexts, but is not inherently magical and is routinely used in other contexts. I don't actually know of any magical connotations for 'vexing', except that it sounds somewhat like 'hexing'.
From the article: "Many of our most vexing problems, from overeating to not saving enough for retirement to not working out enough have something in common: lack of self-control."
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.
"vexing" is defined as "annoying, worrying, or causing problems" [1]. I have encountered the word hundreds of times, but until your comment I wasn't aware that it was used in a magical context too.
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.)
If you search the Authorized King James Version of the Bible you will find this[0] passage:
>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.
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.