Extreme Rituals Promote Prosociality (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Ties That Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and Identification
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.
How Do Rituals Affect Cooperation?
Human Nature, 2013
Collective rituals have long puzzled anthropologists, yet little is known about how rituals affect participants. Our study investigated the effects of nine naturally occurring rituals on prosociality. We operationalized prosociality as (1) attitudes about fellow ritual participants and (2) decisions in a public goods game. The nine rituals varied in levels of synchrony and levels of sacred attribution. We found that rituals with synchronous body movements were more likely to enhance prosocial attitudes. We also found that rituals judged to be sacred were associated with the largest contributions in the public goods game. Path analysis favored a model in which sacred values mediate the effects of synchronous movements on prosocial behaviors. Our analysis offers the first quantitative evidence for the long-standing anthropological conjecture that rituals orchestrate body motions and sacred values to support prosociality. Our analysis, moreover, adds precision to this old conjecture with evidence of a specific mechanism: ritual synchrony increases perceptions of oneness with others, which increases sacred values to intensify prosocial behaviors.
Social inequality and signaling in a costly ritual
Evolution and Human Behavior
Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the impact of socio-environmental factors on the quality of ritual signaling. We examined this impact in the context of the Thaipusam Kavadi, a collective ritual performed by Tamil Hindus worldwide that involves body piercings and other costly activities. We show that participants' relative position in the social hierarchy systematically affects the form of ritual signaling. Specifically, we found that low-status participants are more likely to engage in signaling modalities that require somatic and opportunity costs in the form of body piercings and cumulative effort, while high-status individuals are more likely to use financial capital, in the form of more elaborate material offerings to the deity. Moreover, signaling in each particular modality is stronger among individuals who participate in more public (but not private) rituals, corresponding to their long-term commitment to the community. In sum, our results demonstrate that social hierarchies exact unequal requirements on ritual participants, who in turn modify their signaling strategies accordingly.
Religion, Ritual, and Collective Emotion
Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology. Edited by Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmela. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press., 2014
Collective emotions have many social functions. While oftentimes shared emotions play a crucial role in the integration of different social groups and communities they can also be involved in social conflict and the destructive forces that shape societies. Groups influenced by collective emotions include religious organizations, religious movements, and various cults. But collective emotions can also play a powerful role in many other non-religious groups. How this happens is especially evident in approaches emphasizing ritual dynamics and collective emotions. In that spirit this chapter addresses work I have conducted dealing with ritual and emotions. More precisely, recent attention has been directed to how special collective ritual events influence people's collectively shared emotions and commitment to a group. I address this issue in a theoretical model which focuses on the emotional dimensions of such collective occurrences (Knottnerus, 2010). Framed within this discussion "collective emotions" refer to emotions that vary in their type, strength, or intensity and are shared by actors in special ritual collective events. Before going any further we should appreciate that special collective ritual events are extremely common, occurring throughout history and in societies around the globe. Examples include ceremonies found within the myriad religions practiced by human beings, political rallies, military celebrations, commemorations of important historical events, community festivals, ethnic group festivals, various sporting events ranging from soccer matches or basketball games to the Olympics, weddings and receptions, pep rallies, retreats, special group activities within bureaucratic organizations such as corporations or governmental agencies, and religious, civic, nationalistic, or military holidays (for a theoretical discussion of public ritual see Etzioni, 2000). Furthermore, as will later be discussed, such events can vary enormously in size, can occur at different levels of the social order, and can be of Significance for both large and small scale dimensions of society. To address these issues, the chapter will describe what a special collective ritual event entails; the "structural ritualization theory" which provides the analytical basis for the discussion presented in this chapter; the theoretical model of emotional intensity and commitment in collective ritual events; a discussion of collective emotions and ritual in society involving both theoretical implications and applications of the ideas presented here, and finally present some concluding remarks.
The Cultural Evolution of Hard-to-fake Rituals
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...
Whence Collective Rituals? A Cultural Selection Model of Ritualized Behavior
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]
Costly signaling, ritual and cooperation: evidence from Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion
The apparent wastefulness of religious ritual represents a puzzle for rational choice theorists and evolutionary scholars. In recent years, it has been proposed that such rituals represent costly signals that promote intragroup cooperation precisely because of the effort and resources they require. This hypothesis was tested over the course of a 14-month long ethnographic study in the northeast of Brazil. The research focused on adherents of Candomblé, an African diasporic religion organized in autonomous congregations primarily located in low-income urban areas. Individuals who reported higher levels of religious commitment behaved more generously in a public goods economic game and revealed more instances of provided and received cooperation within their religious community. This suggests that ritual as a costly signaling may effectively predict willingness to cooperate with other group members and that the signaler may accrue benefits in the form of received cooperation. Socioeconomic variables are also shown to mediate religious signaling. This raises the possibility that signalers strategically alter their expressions of commitment as their needs and circumstances change.
Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors-as an evolutionary by-product-the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people's commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today's world.
Revisiting Psychological Mechanisms in the Anthropology of Altruism
Human Nature, 2016
Anthropologists have long been interested in the reasons humans choose to help some individuals and not others. Early research considered psychological mediators, such as feelings of cohesion or closeness, but more recent work, largely in the tradition of human behavioral ecology, shifted attention away from psychological measures to clearer observables, such as past behavior, genetic relatedness, affinal ties, and geographic proximity. In this paper, we assess the value of reintegrating psychological measures-perceived social closeness-into the anthropological study of altruism. Specifically, analyzing social network data from four communities in rural Bangladesh (N = 516), we show that perceived closeness has a strong independent effect on helping, which cannot be accounted for by other factors. These results illustrate the potential value of reintegrating proximate psychological measures into anthropological studies of human cooperation. Keywords Emotional closeness. Social closeness. Social networks. Helping. Friendship. Altruism Early anthropological efforts to understand patterns of human cooperation placed an emphasis on psychological measures, such as feelings of social cohesion (Sahlins 1972), shared identity (Myers 1988), and intimacy (Malinowski 2002), as fundamental determinants of cooperative social behaviors. By contrast, more recent work, especially in evolutionary anthropology, has switched to a focus on readily measured variables-most Hum Nat