Ingredients of ‘rituals’ and their cognitive underpinnings

Ritualized behavior is a specific way of organizing the flow of action, characterized by stereotypy, rigidity in performance, a feeling of compulsion, and specific themes, in particular the potential danger from contamination, predation, and social hazard. We proposed elsewhere a neurocognitive model of ritualized behavior in human development and pathology, as based on the activation of a specific hazard-precaution system specialized in the detection of and response to potential threats. We show how certain features of collective rituals—by conveying information about potential danger and presenting appropriate reaction as a sequence of rigidly described precautionary measures—probably activate this neurocognitive system. This makes some collective ritual sequences highly attention-demanding and intuitively compelling and contributes to their transmission from place to place or generation to generation. The recurrence of ritualized behavior as a central feature of collective ceremonies may be explained as a consequence of this bias in selective transmission. [Keywords: ritual, cognition, evolution, epidemiology, cultural transmission]

Slovak Ethnology, 2022

Although ritual has been a subject of interest in the social sciences since their inception, it remains a fruitful topic, rich in new insights. However, rituals have been primarily studied within social anthropology, religious studies and sociology. Only in the last few decades have psychologists begun to focus on rituals more significantly. In this context, the evolutionary and cognitivist approach, of which the work included in this volume is a sample, is novel not only for the empirical insights it provides but also for its scientific interdisciplinarity and integration. For an illustration, one need only look at two recent books on rituals written by renowned anthropologists Harvey Whitehouse (2021) and Dimitris Xygalatas (2022) to realize to what extent psychological research is being integrated into the study of ritual. It has long been characteristic of the social sciences that new approaches have meant a rejection of the previous ones. Thus, scholarly paradigms have changed almost like architectural or artistic styles over time. The cognitive-evolutionary approach, though, not only integrates science across disciplines but also integrates social scientific knowledge and theories throughout the history of the discipline. Hence, recent research informed by the insights of psychology or biology is directly related to the great names of anthropology and sociology, such as Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Victor Turner and many others.

Numen, 2008

Birds do it. Bees do it. Rituals are common in nature. In our own lineage rituals runs rampant. Why this is so, and how best to examine human rituals, remains some of the most intriguing and contested questions facing scholarly inquiry.

TARGET ARTICLE: CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Most social scientists endorse some version of the claim that participating in collective rituals promotes social cohesion. The systematic testing and evaluation of this claim, however, has been prevented by a lack of precision regarding the nature of both “ritual” and “social cohesion” as well as a lack of integration between the theories and findings of the social and evolutionary sciences. By directly addressing these challenges, we argue that a systematic investigation and evaluation of the claim that ritual promotes social cohesion is achievable. We present a general and testable theory of the relationship between ritual, cohesion, and cooperation that more precisely connects particular elements of “ritual,” such as causal opacity and emotional arousal, to two particular forms of “social cohesion”: group identification and identity fusion. Further, we ground this theory in an evolutionary account of why particular modes of ritual practice would be adaptive for societies with particular resource-acquisition strategies. In setting out our conceptual framework, we report numerous ongoing investigations that test our hypotheses against data from controlled psychological experiments as well as from the ethnographic, archaeological, and historical records.

2017

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical work from social psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Our framework focuses on three primary regulatory functions of rituals: regulation of (a) emotions, (b) performance goal states, and (c) social connection. We examine the possible mechanisms underlying each function by considering the bottom-up processes that emerge from the physical features of rituals and top-down processes that emerge from the psychological meaning of rituals. Our framework, by appreciating the value of psychological theory, generates novel predictions and enriches our understanding of ritual and human behavior more broadly.

In this thesis, I analyze the process of the gradual ritualization of early Christian meals in the first four centuries CE as accompanied by the increasing popularity of beliefs in the supernatural quality of the meal elements. I advocate a general hypothesis that the long-term cultural dynamics of repetitive collective rituals is to a substantial extent driven by how they attract human cognition, an aspect which is at least as important for cultural success of concrete ritual forms as how these ritual forms are designed in respect to fulfill particular social functions. After offering a short sketch of relevant cognitive theories of ritual (Chapter 1) and introducing the perspective of cognitive historiography (Chapter 2), I turn to the historical evidence. Tracing back in time the emergence of beliefs in the supernatural quality of the meal elements in the sources from the fourth and third century, it becomes evident that these beliefs cannot be explained by a reference to changes associated with the “Turn of Constantine” (Chapter 3). Therefore, in Chapter 4, I turn to the process of gradual ritualization of early Christian meal practices over the first two centuries. To emphasize the specificity of my approach in comparison to other trends in contemporary New Testament scholarship, in Chapter 5 I elaborate my approach in detail in respect to the Lord’s Supper tradition in Paul. In Chapter 6, I move back on a more theoretical level, while introducing a computational model of the cultural transmission of rituals, which is partly based on the historical process under scrutiny.

2006

We propose a neuro-cognitive model of the recurrent features of Ritualized Behavior (stereotypy, rigidity in performance, sense of urgency) and the recurrent themes of collective rituals (potential danger from contamination, predation, social hazard). This can only be explained if we consider the broader domain of ritualized behaviour, present in childhood rituals, obsessive-compulsive patho logy and in normal intrusive thoughts or compulsions in adults. On the basis of neuro-cognitive models of clinical and non-clinical individual ritualization, we describe the implication of a Hazard-Precaution system, specialized in the detection of and response to potential threats to fitness. Collective rituals include description of potential hazards and prescriptions for actions that closely match those engaged in security motivation. Indeed, compulsive pathologies and collective rituals are so similar in both themes (contamination, social hazard) and organization (ritualization). In our sele...

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018

Research into the mental processes that are involved in both the performance and the observance of rituals has a long history but has only since the 1990s become an active field of systematic inquiry in the cognitive sciences, particularly within cognitive anthropology. The distinctive feature of cognitive approaches to ritual is that they try to address how ritual performances interact and are shaped by features of the human mind. The majority of researchers in this area also share the view that, due to humans' shared evolutionary heritage, there are shared features of cognition that shape and constrain how rituals are perceived, performed, and transmitted across generations. While the presence of ritual is often cited as a universal feature of human societies, with Roy Rappaport (1999, 31) declaring that "no society is devoid of what a reasonable observer would recognize as ritual," the term itself is famously problematic to define. This has led to cognitive researchers endorsing a distinction between ritualized behaviors, referring to the rule-governed repetition of formalized elementary gestures emancipated from their full performance, and cultural rituals, which may involve ritualized behaviors but also include more elaborate scripted, ceremonial, and symbolic elements. This distinction is important: although ritualized behaviors can be found throughout the animal kingdom, in courting dances and the ritualized postures and gestures of intraspecies status competitions, cultural rituals, with their rich symbolism and ability to transmit or reinforce social norms, are unique to humans.

Psychological Bulletin, 2012

Social norms are communally agreed upon, morally signif1cant behavioral standards that are, at least in pan, responsible for uniquely human forms of cooperation and social organization, This anicle summa rizes evidence demonstrating that ritual and ritualized behaviors arc essential to the transmission and reinforcement of social norms, Ritualized behaviors reliably signal an intentional mental state giving credibility to verbal expressions while emotionally binding people to each other and group-based values. Early ritualized infant-caregiver interactions and the family routines and rituals that emerge from them are pnmary mechanisms for transmitting social norms vertically from parent to offspring, while adult community rituals are a primary mechanism by which norms are reinforced horizontally within the community,

It has been proposed that costly rituals act as honest signals of commitment to group beliefs when such rituals appear dysphoric and unappealing (costly) to non-believers, but appealing to true believers (Irons, 2001). If only true believers are willing to endure ritual behaviors and true belief also entails belief in altruistic cooperation, associating with other ritual practitioners can help solve cooperation dilemmas in groups by sorting out potential free-riders. While this hypothesis is obviously true if such ‘faking’ of ritual is strictly impossible, strict impossibility seems implausible. ‘Faking’ is defined by Irons in this context to be to be performing the ritual without commitment to group beliefs. In this paper, I posit various ways that such faking might be difficult, instead of impossible, or different ways in which such ritual faking might be ‘costly’ and then formally model the social learning and cultural evolution dynamics to see where it may still hold theoretical...