Ritual explained: interdisciplinary answers to Tinbergen's four questions

Abstract

Convergent developments across social scientific disciplines provide evidence that rituals are a psychologically prepared and culturally inherited behavioural hallmark of our species. The dramatic diversity of ritual practices ranges from simple greetings to elaborate religious ceremonies, from the benign to life-threatening. Yet our scientific understanding of this core human trait remains limited. Explaining the universality, functionality and diversity of ritual requires insight from multiple disciplines. This special issue integrates research from anthropology, archaeology, biology, primatology, cognitive science, psychology, religious studies and demography to build an interdisciplinary account of ritual. The objective is to contribute to an integrative explanation of ritual by addressing Tinbergen's four key questions. These include answering ultimate questions about the (i) phylogeny and (ii) adaptive functions of ritual; and proximate questions about the (iii) mechanisms and (iv) ontogeny of ritual. The intersection of these four complementary lines of inquiry yields new avenues for theory and research into this fundamental aspect of the human condition, and in so doing, into the coevolution of cognition and culture. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours’.

Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age

“…Even though our study did not focus on learning per se, our finding that infants increasingly engage in coordinated attention and increasingly prefer attending to face-to-face interactions raises the possibility that information-seeking motivations steer infants' attention toward situations in which they can gather knowledge. Both situations provide opportunities to acquire culturally relevant knowledge, including knowledge about content in the environment (e.g., information about novel objects, Csibra & Shamsudheen, 2015) or knowledge embodied in interpersonal interaction (e.g., coordinated action rituals, Legare & Nielsen, 2020). Another candidate mechanism could be infants' intrinsic social motivation (e.g., Chevallier et al, 2012).…”

Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution

“…Rituals are socially stipulated, conventional behaviors that are critical for group social interaction; they also drive cultural transmission within and between generations ( Legare and Nielsen, 2020 ). Rituals are very diverse and complex, but often involve synchronic movement, causally opaque action, and both euphoric and dysphoric arousal ( Whitehouse and Lanman, 2014 ; Boyer and Liénard, 2020 ).…”

“…Ritualized behaviors in the animal kingdom have the basic function of enhancing coordination and cooperation ( Winkelman, 2009 , 2019b , c ). In humans, they also have other social, psychological, and instrumental functions involving, for instance, signaling commitment to others, binding group members together, and reducing individual and collective anxiety ( Boyer and Liénard, 2020 ; Legare and Nielsen, 2020 ; Nielsen et al, 2020 ). In traditional cultures, rituals often have goals related to survival and reproductive success such as curing an illness, harming a rival, or ensuring success in hunting ( Rossano, 2020 ).…”

“…In traditional cultures, rituals often have goals related to survival and reproductive success such as curing an illness, harming a rival, or ensuring success in hunting ( Rossano, 2020 ). They are particularly crucial during times of transition, risk, and uncertainty in the human lifespan ( Legare and Nielsen, 2020 ).…”

“…In fact, naturalistic psilocybin use has been associated with sub-acute enhancements in divergent thinking ( Mason et al, 2019 ) and creative problem-solving ability ( Sweat et al, 2016 ). Since reasoning about causally opaque events or outcomes – those lacking a known causal explanation – is a pervasive feature of human cognition ( Legare and Nielsen, 2020 ), it seems fitting that certain individuals (particularly ritual leaders) in numerous cultures adopted psychedelics as instruments for inspiration and envisioning, since they provide a state of consciousness that can potentially facilitate creative generation addressing knowledge gaps.…”