Extreme Rituals Promote Prosociality

Xygalatas, Dimitris; Mitkidis, Panagiotis; Fischer, Ronald; Reddish, Paul; Skewes, Joshua; Geertz, Armin W.; Roepstorff, Andreas; Bulbulia, Joseph

doi:10.1177/0956797612472910

Cited by 301 publications

(223 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…More religious individuals reported less pain (Fischer and Kruekaew, data not shown). Therefore, similar to the findings by Xygalatas et al (2013), the subjective experience of pain and suffering was negatively associated with self-reported religiosity. These patterns need to be re-examined in light of the theories and experimental findings of pain experiences reviewed above.…”

Section: Pain and Religiositysupporting

confidence: 76%

“…In the study by Xygalatas et al (2013), adjusting for religiosity or how often participants visited the temple did not affect the donation and pain findings (Figure 3). Yet, there was a negative relationship between perceived difficulty of carrying the "kavadi" and how religious individuals felt: r = −0.28, p < 0.01, N = 88.…”

Section: Pain and Religiositymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This procession occurs during the hottest part of the year, under the scortching sun, with the participants walking barefoot over hot asphalt and climbing the mountain without eating or drinking. Xygalatas et al (2013) compared those who participated in the low ordeal ritual with both participants and observers in the high-ordeal ritual in a quasi-experimental design. Although random assignment was obviously not possible in a naturalistic study, the setting or the ritual allowed for random selection, i.e., each subject took part in both rituals but participated in the study only in one instance.…”

Section: Pain In Extreme Rituals: Moving Research To the Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, no empirical proof of such mechanisms has been provided. In a field experiment, Xygalatas et al (2013) studied naturally occurring rituals that varied in terms of levels of intensity for participants. A low-ordeal ritual a few days before the main ritual involved praying and chanting for several hours inside a Hindu temple and circling the temple in unison.…”

Section: Pain In Extreme Rituals: Moving Research To the Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Extreme Rituals as Social Technologies

Fischer

Xygalatas

2014

J Cogn Cult

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We often think of pain as intrinsically bad, and the avoidance of pain is a fundamental evolutionary drive of all species. How can we then explain widespread cultural practices like certain rituals that involve the voluntary infliction of physical pain? In this paper, we argue that inflicting and experiencing pain in a ritual setting may serve important psychological and social functions. By providing psychological relief and leading to stronger identification with the group, such practices may result in a positive feedback loop, which serves both to increase the social cohesion of the community and the continuation of the ritual practices themselves. We argue that although the selective advantage of participation lies at the individual level, the benefits of those practices de facto extend to the group level, thereby allowing extreme rituals to function as effective social technologies.

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Section: Pain and Religiositysupporting

confidence: 76%

Section: Pain and Religiositymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pain In Extreme Rituals: Moving Research To the Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pain In Extreme Rituals: Moving Research To the Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Extreme Rituals as Social Technologies

Fischer

Xygalatas

2014

J Cogn Cult

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“…This helps to partly explain two phenomena: the evolution of large and complex human societies and the religious features of societies with greater social complexity that are heavily populated by such gods 6,7 . In addition to some forms of religious rituals and non-religious norms and institutions, such as courts, markets and police, the present results point to the role that commitment to knowledgeable, moralistic and punitive gods plays in solidifying the social bonds that create broader imagined communities 11,12,31 . Tables S5 and S6 for all other models (highlights from models 1 FE presented here).…”

mentioning

confidence: 67%

Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality

Purzycki

Apicella

Atkinson

et al. 2016

Nature

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371

262

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Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality Benjamin Grant Purzycki 1 , Coren Apicella 2 , Quentin D. Atkinson 3,4 , Emma Cohen 5,6 , Rita Anne Mcnamara 7 , Aiyana K. Willard 8 , Dimitris Xygalatas 9,10,11 , Ara norenzayan 7 & Joseph henrich 7,12,13 Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded 1,2 . This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms 3,4 . Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers 5-8 . We tested this hypothesis using extensive ethnographic interviews and two behavioural games designed to measure impartial rule-following among people (n = 591, observations = 35,400) from eight diverse communities from around the world: (1) inland Tanna, Vanuatu; (2) coastal Tanna, Vanuatu; (3) Yasawa, Fiji; (4) Lovu, Fiji; (5) Pesqueiro, Brazil; (6) Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius; (7) the Tyva Republic (Siberia), Russia; and (8) Hadzaland, Tanzania. Participants reported adherence to a wide array of world religious traditions including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as notably diverse local traditions, including animism and ancestor worship. Holding a range of relevant variables constant, the higher participants rated their moralistic gods as punitive and knowledgeable about human thoughts and actions, the more coins they allocated to geographically distant co-religionist strangers relative to both themselves and local co-religionists. Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality.Among the other factors 2-4,7 that influence the emergence of human ultrasociality and complex societies, the diffusion of explicit beliefs in increasingly moralistic, punitive and knowledgeable gods may have played a crucial role 6,7 . People may trust in, cooperate with and interact fairly within wider social circles, partly because they believe that knowing gods will punish them if they do not. Additionally, through increased frequency and consistency in belief and behaviour sets, commitments to the same gods coordinate people's expectations about social interactions [5][6][7][8][9] . Moreover, the social radius within which people are willing to engage in behaviours that benefit others at a cost to themselves may enlarge as gods' powers to monitor and punish increase 10 . To account f...

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Ritual and Cognition

Kavanagh

2018

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

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Research into the mental processes that are involved with both the performance and the observance of rituals has a long history but it was not until the 1990s, with the resurgence of evolutionary and cognitive approaches to examining culture, that this developed into an active field of research. The distinctive feature of cognitive approaches to examining ritual is that they try to address how ritual performances interact and are shaped by the features of the human mind. The dominant topics of research in cognition and ritual have explored how rituals are linked to early‐developing overimitative tendencies; preexisting cognitive systems for avoiding hazards, encoding salient memories, and parsing action sequences; and how participation in harsh or traumatic rituals functions as a form of costly signaling of commitment to a group and encourages prosocial behavior from observers and participants.

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Extreme Rituals Promote Prosociality

Cited by 301 publications

References 20 publications

Extreme Rituals as Social Technologies

Extreme Rituals as Social Technologies

Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality

Ritual and Cognition

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