Social evolution: The ritual animal

Jones, Dan

doi:10.1038/493470a

Cited by 15 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 8 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…The "gap" between biology and culture may be bridged through the assumption that culture, as "extended phenotype" (Dawkins, 1989), continues the ancient paths followed by biological evolution (Lévi-Strauss, 1958;Wickler and Seibt, 1991;Burkert, 1998). We suggest that the "ritual mind" (Jones, 2013), i.e. the widespread drive to ritualization typical of every culture, is biologically inherited and goes back to the phylogenetic roots of our species.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…With regard to intra-specific communication, through an exaptation phenomenon, habitual patterns that, for example originally served the function of body maintenance, acquire a communicative value, thus appearing as exaggerated copies of the original pragmatic ones. Collective rituals, exactly like in animal kingdom, promote a sense of connection within the group (Jones, 2013). A crucial mode of ritual cohesion is synchronized physical action that favors cooperation, shared intentionality (Reddish et al, 2013), intimate communicative and emotional bonding (Whitehouse, 2004).…”

Section: Intra-specific Communication and Group Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The biological origins of rituals: An interdisciplinary perspective

Tonna

Marchesi

Parmigiani

2019

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

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Ritual behavior is ubiquitous, marking animal motor patterns, normal and psychopathological behavior in human individuals as well as every human culture. Moreover, formal features of rituals appear to be highly conserved along phylogeny and characterized by a circular and spatio-temporal structure typical of habitual behavior with internal repetition of non-functional acts and redirection of attention to the "script" of the performance. A continuity, based on highly conserved cortico-striatal loops, can be traced from animal rituals to human individual and collective rituals with psychopathological compulsions at the crossing point. The transition from "routinization" to "ritualization" may have been promoted to deal with environmental unpredictability in non-social contexts and, through motor synchronization, to enhance intra-group cohesion and communication in social contexts.Ultimately, ritual, following its biological constraints exerts a "homeostatic" function on the environment (social and non-social) under conditions of unpredictability.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Intra-specific Communication and Group Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The biological origins of rituals: An interdisciplinary perspective

Tonna

Marchesi

Parmigiani

2019

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

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“…Next, the two types of social glue may compete on various time scales. In a related interview, Whitehead suggests that rituals employing the two types of social cohesion may be competing over evolutionary time as design features in social systems (Jones, 2013). He states that low frequency intense rituals have been eliminated in modern social groups because they are powerful and destabilize larger social structures.…”

Section: On Mixing Gluesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Application Methods for Various Types of Social Glue. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Waring

2013

CDN

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“…This issue is important if we wish to map interactions to social relations which have positive or negative signs. Empirical studies have shown that more interactions indicate a positive social relation, e.g., a stronger friendship[85,89,169], whereas less interactions indicate a negative relation which causes e.g., avoidance behavior[74,96].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling social resilience: Questions, answers, open problems

Schweitzer¹,

Andres²,

Casiraghi³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and its ability to recover from them. We develop a framework to quantify the resilience of highly volatile, non-equilibrium social organizations, such as collectives or collaborating teams. It consists of four steps: (i) delimitation, i.e., narrowing down the target systems, (ii) conceptualization, i.e., identifying how to approach social organizations, (iii) formal representation using a combination of agent-based and network models, (iv) operationalization, i.e. specifying measures and demonstrating how they enter the calculation of resilience. Our framework quantifies two dimensions of resilience, the robustness of social organizations and their adaptivity, and combines them in a novel resilience measure. It allows monitoring resilience instantaneously using longitudinal data instead of an ex-post evaluation.

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Social evolution: The ritual animal

Cited by 15 publications

References 8 publications

The biological origins of rituals: An interdisciplinary perspective

The biological origins of rituals: An interdisciplinary perspective

On the Application Methods for Various Types of Social Glue. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Modeling social resilience: Questions, answers, open problems

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