Lambert here: Only new rituals? Not new religions? Or churches?
By Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist and cognitive scientist who runs the experimental anthropology lab at the University of Connecticut. Originally published at Undark.
Anthropologists have long been aware that even rituals that seem very different and that take place in entirely unrelated domains can still have remarkable similarities. It’s not just that they involve causally opaque actions with no obvious relation to a specific outcome. The daily routines of little children, the superstitions enacted by gamblers and athletes, the prayers directed at various deities, religious and secular collective rituals, and even the pathological hyper-ritualization of those who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, all seem to share some key structural elements.
First of all, ritualization is characterized by rigidity: ritual actions must always be performed in the same way (the right way). Fidelity is crucial; deviations from the script are not acceptable. In most contexts, drinking tea can be done in any number of ways. All you need is some tea leaves and some means of boiling water. But a Japanese tea ceremony must be choreographed precisely. While there may be some variation between local versions and tea masters, a strict protocol defines when guests should arrive, how they will be greeted, and where they must be seated. The tea room must have an alcove at one end, a hearth, and a hanging scroll on the wall. The hosts wear special clothes.
Preparation requires specific utensils that must be handled with exquisite care: they are often only to be touched with a gloved hand and must be purified before and after each use. Guests too must be pure: they remove their shoes, bow silently, and perform ablutions. A bell rings to mark the various stages of the ceremony. The tea is served on the floor. It must be picked up with the right hand, placed on the palm of the left hand, turned clockwise, and bowed to. Myriad other rules prescribe even the minutest details, from how to hand a towel to the way the lid must be placed on the kettle. As a result, some tea ceremonies can last up to four hours.
The social importance of adhering to a script became apparent during the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made the tiniest of mistakes when administering the oath to the president. The wording mandated in the U.S. Constitution reads: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States…” Roberts, who was reciting the oath from memory, said “…that I will execute the Office of President to the United States faithfully.”
Obama seemed to realize the mistake and paused, giving the chief justice a chance to recite the oath again. Roberts once more stumbled over the words, and Obama finally declared, “I will execute the Office of President of the United States faithfully.” Although all three sentences carried identical meaning, it is the letter, not the spirit, that matters in ritual. Public controversy arose after the inauguration, which led some to question the very legitimacy of the presidency. The constitutional professor Jack Beermann told the San Francisco Chronicle that “It’s an open question whether he’s president until he takes the proper oath,” and other legal scholars expressed similar worries. Although Obama initially dismissed these concerns, he eventually met Roberts at the White House, where the president retook the oath. Members of the press were invited to document the event, which, according to the White House, was done out of “an abundance of caution.”
A second hallmark of ritualization is repetition. A mantra might be repeated 108 times; Greek Orthodox Christians cross themselves three times; and those who knock on wood always do so more than once. In addition to this internal repetition, in most cases the ritual itself is reproduced regularly. The Book of Psalms contains phrases like “Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray” (55:17), or “Seven times a day do I praise thee” (119:164). Similarly, Muslims pray five times a day, soldiers raise and lower the flag daily, and schools hold yearly graduation ceremonies.
Finally, another characteristic of ritualization is that it involves redundancy. That is, even when ritual actions can be said to have a direct causal effect, they often go above and beyond what might be normally expected for practical purposes. Washing your hands for 20 seconds might be enough to ensure proper hygiene, but a cleansing ritual may go on for hours. In my fieldwork I have attended Hindu ceremonies that lasted up to a week and involved countless ritual actions. Similarly, the professor of philosophy Frits Staal documented the Agnicayana, a Vedic ritual performed in India, which continued for 12 days and included a total of 80 hours of collective recitations and chanting.
Observing the frequency and duration of a ceremony is fairly straightforward. But how can we measure things like rigidity and redundancy, and what counts as repetition? The traditional way of doing this would be to observe or film people’s behavior and make a note each time a new movement or sequence of movements occurred. But this requires great effort, constant attention, and many subjective decisions, so there is a lot of room for error. Luckily, technological advances now allow us to automate this process. In a 2015 study I conducted with colleagues on the effects of anxiety, we used motion-capture technology to measure ritualization in people’s actions. Our hypothesis was that, as people got more stressed, their movements would become more repetitive (think of tapping, waving, scratching, etc.), rigid (following predictable action patterns) and redundant (lasting longer than necessary).
To evaluate this hypothesis, we first needed to induce anxiety — in other words, to create a stressful situation. With that in mind, we brought people into a lab, showed them a decorative object and gave them some questions about it. Half of the study participants were told that they had three minutes to think about the answers and then discuss them with the experimenter. This was not a particularly stressful task. But the other half of the participants had a very different experience. They were told that they would have to present their answers in the form of a public speech delivered in front of a panel of expert art critics who were waiting in the next room. To prepare that speech, they would only get three minutes.
People dread being put on the spot, especially when they are unprepared and the audience is made up of experts. Such is our fear of public speaking that there is a special word for it: glossophobia. And since the study participants were also wearing heart-rate monitors, we were able to verify that their experience was indeed stressful.
Before they made their presentations, we asked our participants to clean the artifact with a piece of cloth, although it was already clean when they entered the room. This was the time during which we used our motion sensors to analyze their actions. We found that those who were more stressed displayed more ritualized behavior: their hand movements became more repetitive and predictable, engaging in the same action patterns again and again. And the more anxious people felt during the experiment, the more time they spent cleaning the object. Under the stress of the situation they began to clean obsessively even when there was nothing left to clean.
Ritualization, then, seems to come as a natural response to anxiety. And in fact, we are not the only species for which this holds true.
In 1948 the famed psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article with the peculiar title “‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon,” in which he reported the results of a rather unusual experiment. Skinner had concocted an apparatus called an “operant conditioning chamber” (now more commonly known as the “Skinner box”), which he used to conduct various studies with animals. It was a highly controlled environment in which he could vary one element at a time and observe what changes it wrought on the animal’s behavior.
Skinner was interested in how organisms learn, and especially in “operant conditioning,” a form of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for a given behavior. In one experiment an electrical current ran through the floor of the box, but a lever on the wall of the box could be pressed to stop the current. When a rat was placed in the box, it would feel pain and start to move around. Sooner or later, it would stumble on the lever, and the current would stop. The rat would quickly learn to press the lever each time it was placed into the box, even when the floor was not electrified.
Another experiment was designed to look at positive reinforcement. The lever delivered a reward in the form of a food pellet. Once the animal discovered this, it would start associating it with the reward and within a few trials it would immediately rush to the lever as soon as it was let into the box.
In the 1948 experiment, Skinner placed a hungry pigeon inside the box and programmed the release mechanism to deliver the food pellets regularly, no matter what the bird did. The results astounded him: Much like gamblers and athletes, the birds began to develop elaborate rituals. Skinner wrote:
“One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrusted its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. The body generally followed the movement and a few steps might be taken when it was extensive. Another bird was conditioned to make incomplete pecking or brushing movements directed toward but not touching the floor.”
The same kinds of responses that Skinner observed in pigeons were later documented in children. In what sounds like a rather unsettling experiment, Gregory Wagner and Edward Morris placed children in a room with a mechanical clown that dispensed marble balls from its mouth; the children could later exchange these for toys. Just like Skinner’s avian subjects, the children started enacting various ritualized behaviors to get the clown to release the reward. Some of them touched the clown’s face or kissed him. Others made grimaces, and some started swinging or swirling in a dance-like fashion.
In adults, too, ritualization seems to trigger intuitive biases related to causal reasoning. A study conducted in Brazil and the U.S. found that structural aspects of rituals such as repetition and redundancy make these rituals seem more efficient. Research subjects were asked to evaluate the efficacy of simpatias, formulaic magical spells used in parts of Brazil to address all manner of practical problems, from finding love to curing toothache.
The spells varied across a number of characteristics, such as how many steps they involved, how many times those steps had to be executed, and how strict and specific they were. The researchers found that rituals that were more repetitive, rigid, and strictly defined were also perceived to be more effective in dealing with everyday problems.
Another study of simpatias conducted by the same researchers found that introducing uncertainty increased people’s perceptions of ritual efficacy. They presented two groups of subjects with a cognitive task consisting of sorting out a series of scrambled sentences. The first group was given sentences that were meant to prime them with randomness by including words such as “chaotic” or “random.” Participants in the second group unscrambled similar sentences containing neutral or other negative words, such as “lazy” or “green.” Following this task, all subjects were shown the same list of simpatias. The group that had been primed with randomness judged those spells to be more likely to work.
One interpretation of these findings may be that people’s intuitions about those rituals are dependent on cultural notions of supernatural agency. After all, magic spells are typically meant to invoke the powers of some spirit, deity, or karmic force to bring about the desired outcome. This is certainly true of many cultural rituals. But does ritualization trigger intuitions about causality independently of those cultural beliefs? To find out, my team and I conducted a study in my lab at the University of Connecticut.
Using recordings of college basketball games, we showed people videos of players shooting free-throws. After the ball left their hands, we paused the video and asked them to predict the success of each shot. Half of the time the players in those videos performed pre-shot rituals, such as spinning, bouncing or kissing the ball, or touching the soles of their shoes. These behaviors are common among basketball players. The other half of the time no rituals were enacted before the shot. In reality, participants saw exactly the same shots in both conditions, but we manipulated the camera angle to either reveal or obscure the ritualized actions.
We found that participants expected the ritualized shots to be over 30 percent more successful. This perceptual bias was consistent no matter what their level of expertise: people with no knowledge of the sport, fans who regularly watched basketball and even basketball players were equally susceptible. Moreover, this effect became stronger when the game score was more negative. The more they were losing — in other words, the less control players had over the game — the more our study participants expected the rituals to work.
These findings suggest that ritualization is a natural way to try to control the world around us. We spontaneously engage in ritualized behaviors when we face stressful and uncertain situations, and we intuitively expect those ritualized actions to have an effect. But if this sense of control is illusory, what could possibly be the benefit of it? Why would this cognitive glitch persist rather than being weeded out by natural selection?
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Given how widely ritual is observed in courtship behaviors, I find it unsurprising that ritual has not been weeded out by natural selection.
This seems not to detract from, but rather to support the conjecture that ritual is induced in “uncertain situations”.
Ritual hate, as in TDS seems to be the USian ritual du jour.
thank you for bringing this up. ive been noting the inevitable (& mostly gratuitous) reference to trump in almost every article i read, including this reference in the article on gaslighting linked here on NC the other day: “Commentators have also used it to describe the mind-bending denials of reality coming out of the White House during the Trump presidency.” i would add that trumps name is 1 of the few “real” names in this lengthy article, as the many victims are given aliases, such as – rather surprisingly – “selah”. a gratuitous henry james reference there. although, given the circumstances of the novel in which selah appears, perhaps that reference is not gratuitous.
With the Premack Principle, pretty much any stimulus or behavior can be conditioned as precedent to a reward, which means it becomes rewarding in itself. A very simple principle leading to an infinity of possible ’causes’. Good science is hard.
The ‘hundred biases’ article in today’s links has a similar issue. The author tries to rehabilitate the rational-actor model by overlaying abstractions on top of it. Rational comes from ratio, there is a ratio model of behavior called the Matching Law (aka melioration). It’s simple, but given path-dependence has a very large number of outcomes. So it can be used to engineer simple behaviors, but trying to backtrack ‘rational’ from the datum leads to a chaos crash.
What we need, and seem to have lost, is a “rational society” model, but this is “computationally intractable”: Even as children, having siblings and parents with indecipherable objectives, it is uncertain which actions will have sustainable rewards. Economics does us no favor by putting the individual “rational actor” alone and naked on the stage. But of course that is how social darwinists would like to see their prey.
To the extent that their classical culture survives, the Chinese might still a this “rational society” objective, but it *is* computationally complex. When times change and our habits no longer comport with our environment, the lone wolf “rational actor” can obtain a single-minded advantage.
Xygalatas brings up a fundamental problem of U.S. culture: U.S. religion, being based in Calvinism, is opposed to ritual.
Yet Roman religion (which then greatly influenced Roman Catholicism) centered on ritual. (At the same time that the Romans were interacting with their eight million or so gods and goddesses and numina.) Many Roman rituals were as complicated as the Hindu rites that he refers to.
Likewise, the Greeks engaged in complicated rituals, everything from the not-fully-understood pharmakos to the mysteries at Eleusis.
Either ritual is effective, in which case it enhances religion and life itself.
Or only sermons are effective, which I tend to doubt. Interpreting The Book lacks the lymph of life.
So the U.S. is left in the detritus of Calvinism, and I’m not persuaded that Calvinism is even a religious movement. Better that those Presbyterians and Methodists learn to cross themselves three times. It might help with the good works…
You made me curious as to whether Calvinists actively downplay ritual and I discovered TULIP, an acronym used by English-speaking Calvinists:
Total depravity (of man)
Unconditional election
Limited atonement
Irresistable grace
Perseverance of the saints
Easy to see why this would be the flavor Christianity prefered by many billionaires. You can’t help being depraved, what’s going to happen is going to happen, being contrite only goes so far, God can forgive anything and if he can’t, the saints will help you with that.
No word on if the saints will actually help with shovels when it comes time to bury your victims. THANKS for your comment as it speaks to the nature of the divide between American Catholics and Protestants which is much deeper than the swells like to acknowledge. I was raised to see Catholicism as a “fancy” religion. Now I know why.
Christian religions preach forgiveness. Most American presidents have attended Christian church. They continued to perpetrate ghastly crimes around the world, but always they sought forgiveness by their church so all was well in their minds. War crimes are forgiven. Murder, rape, and displacement are forgiven. And so on.
People and pigeons alike seem to have both personal and public rituals. I think it’s the Calvinist’s prohibition of public ritual that is particularly damaging to a social fabric.
Calvinists sing hymns and tell bible stories, some of them very beautiful, isn’t that ritual? The thing is that the different churches don’t do these things at the same time or in the same order, I guess. Which may be why they went in for mass camp meetings.
Gramsci, I’m not entirely convinced that the Calvinists prohibit public ritual. Though my knowledge of actual Calvinists (Presbyterians) is somewhat limited, having been brought up in a rather strenuously non-religious household. Rousseau was a Calvinist and he was an enthusiastic advocate of Civic religion/ ritual, which was subsequently taken up in spades during the French Revolution. Of course Rousseau himself was persona non grata among both Calvinists and Catholics, which may somehow prove your point. Did Boston shun state holidays and parades? I know they frowned on Christmas until the late 19th century, (by which time they had morphed into Unitarians, many of them).
All of biology is a feedback loop between tradition and renewal. Look at how gene expression works.
Under that, it’s the tension between order and energy. Galaxies are energy radiating out, while structure coalesces in. Essentially the synchronization of wave dynamics is centripetal, while the effect of the light radiating out serves to harmonize across all structures. Black holes to black body radiation.
The problem is that our physiological makeup causes us to focus more on the patterns, than the processes generating them.
Consider that as these mobile organisms, this sentient interface between our body and its environment operates as a sequence of perceptions, originally to navigate the physical space, but now constantly creating and navigating conceptual and abstract spaces. So our concept of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future, while the underlaying reality is that change is turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is “conserved,” because it manifests this presence, creating the effect of time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns it generates go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise.
So that when obsessional behaviors take over, it’s like trying to create pure signal, without any noise. Spiraling into that eye of the storm at the center.
One example I experience is trying to bring up the above point about time in various professional discussions. Safe to say, I pretty much get shut down and called an idiot in any physics discussions, but find neurologists quite intrigued by the relationship between consciousness and thought, given that consciousness is such an open question.
I could extend this relationship out to the social dynamics as well, given government, as executive and regulatory function, is analogous to a central nervous system, while money and banking function as a form of economic blood and circulation system. We are currently spiraling into the feedback loop of compound interest, wealth and power used to generate more wealth and power, with no circuit breakers, aka, debt jubilees, revolutions, etc, to break the cycle.
I.e., we’re headed for a grand mal seizure. Yeah, I think you’ve got it right.
Exactly. Seizures are a neurologic feedback loop. Too much personal experience there.
It also goes to the power and obsessiveness of math, as an effort to distill away all noise from the signal.
Wondering if you have read Julian Barbour’s “The End of Time”?
It’s been some years, probably back in the oughts. I didn’t really buy into his shapes. As I’m arguing, the processes generating the patterns are cause and the patterns are effect.
By treating time as a dimension, events, our points of measurement, are primary to this presence generating them. The primary argument for events over “the present,” is there is no universal simultaneity, as events will be observed in different order in different locations. Yet that’s no more consequential than seeing the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago. It’s the energy that is conserved and manifests the events, not the information generated. Time is due to this information changing. So all aspects of time, past, present and future, are effects of this dynamic and how it interacts as you and your point of view.
Another problem with treating time as a dimension is that because the duration between event A and event B would be the same as between B and A, it’s argued time is symmetric. It doesn’t matter which way it goes and the asymmetry only emerges with entropy. Though if we treat time as a measure and effect of action, like temperature, then action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is a second order effect and not what is directly measured.
Another argument is time is relative to acceleration and gravity, but as a measure, different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. It is because culture is about synchronizing society into one larger organism, using the same laws, measures, languages, etc, that it seems there should be one universal clock/flow of time, but the reason nature is so diverse and so integrated, is because everything doesn’t march to the beat of the same drummer. Synchronization versus harmonization.
It also goes to the issue of determinism, as it is observed that cause flows from effect, so the entire course of time must be determined by initial conditions. Although as effect, the process of determination can only occur as the present. The mathematical operation is a verb. As Alan Watts put it; “The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.”
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don’t consider them as identical with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as the sequence of change is to our thought process. Like a geocentric cosmology, we tend to put our experience at the center and build out from there.
I think this is very profound. And, to simplify horribly, it’s a response (pro-active sometimes, on the part of organisms) to ever changing environmental conditions.
Au contraire. I have participated in many ceremonies–none of the tourist variety–in homes, temples, and police stations. The most memorable was so deftly performed that I didn’t realize was happening until it was over.
Very interesting. Thank you, Lambert.
I perform a ‘tea ritual’ every morning: tray, napkin, tea pot, milk pitcher (milk must be heated), honey, special cup, special spoon (lately have found myself becoming agitated if I can’t find the ‘tea spoon’, resulting in frantic searches among the unwashed silverware!)
And here in the US of A, we are encouraged to perform a ritual every two years, on the first Monday of November. In the past, we have traveled to a special location and entered a tiny room, where, presented with a paper list, we fill in certain boxes with a Number 2 pencil, then deposit said paper in a special box, watched over by a solemn panel of local citizens. This ritual supposedly insures installation of godly rulers who will bring prosperity to the Land.
Due to technology, some aspects of this ritual have changed and we are experiencing National anxiety which expresses itself in increasingly strident attempts to repudiate the results of this biennial ritual. So, as DJG observes above, we get more sermons.
I myself think that the ritual fireworks on the Sacred Fourth of July have not been of adequate quantity or quality in recent decades. The Gods are angry and hungry; they want real sacrifices, not a pathetic simulacrum of death and destruction.
I was very excited to read this essay because of my interest in repetitive human interactions. Unfortunately it seems in the quest for “hard science” data while working to understand human and social behaviors, this research work has transposed superstition with ritual.
It is mind-boggling to me that such a misuse of words can happen at such a large scale: the researchers titled their book with the wrong word.
superstition:
excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings: he dismissed the ghost stories as mere superstition.
• a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief: she touched her locket for luck, a superstition she had had since childhood.
ritual:
a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order: the role of ritual in religion | the ancient rituals of Christian worship.
• the prescribed order of performing a ceremony, especially one characteristic of a particular religion or church: she likes the High Church ritual.
• a series of actions or type of behavior regularly and invariably followed by someone: her visits to Joy became a ritual.
So, yes, indeed, the researchers are pursuing a deeper understanding of how superstition operates. Unfortunately they use the wrong word, and in the process demean ceremonies and behaviors of a disagreeable subset of fellow humans. It is quite likely disrespecting people and behaviors the researchers don’t like. How better to demean all kinds of religions by telling them they are all false beliefs.
More importantly with their confusion of words in the English language, these researchers add to societal anxieties, because they instill an offensive miscommunication of their own ideas, yet much more significantly, science itself.
About repetitive human interactions.
The interactions do not need to be the same, they do not need to be with the same people, yet the frequency matters. It is repetitive interactions between humans and spaces that create social phenomena.
Certainly sometimes, if such repetitive interactions develop in certain ways, repetitive interactions can become ceremonies. And if ceremonies evolve in certain ways they can become rituals, and even superstitions. For example in early human settlements priests used to predict when to plant and when to harvest. And often it was superstitious, or studied weather patterns mixed with superstitions.
In our current world with anxiety and stress being prevalent, some amount of ceremony is probably helpful to people and their communities.
You should have seen the ritual that the whole televised world endured in the 10 days following the death of a 96 year old woman. Very few were alive when her father died, 70 years ago, and nobody has recounted how long his ‘wake’ lasted, or how much angst it caused in the country, or the wider world, or, say, in the United States. But this one, with the benefit of a technologically heavy state broadcaster deploying cameras, battalions of ‘journalists’ and squadrons of drones to boot, was a ritual amplified enormously. The United States, which abrogated her great-great-great-great grandfather in 1776, oohed and aahed over this one as if still tugging the forelock and falling into line.
One hopes the next change of monarch doesn’t entail a similar amplification of the ritual.
I did the worst skim job anyone could do. And then came to comments here to see if anyone else took away what I presumptuously thought might be the message. Guess you are the one Lambke.
I side with Jung, though he was fortunate to have the time to think about the issue.
“Sacred Web Journal” has impressed me, “a journal of tradition & modernity.”
My wife daily performs the anxiety re-enforcing ritual of turning on the TV “news.” This balm of information contains few discordant notes and appears to provide her with the satisfaction that her worldview is unshakably correct, and that she is indeed aligned with the elect. When she visits me, I refuse to allow any forms of agitation/propaganda in the apartment and this induces stress in her. She might find, as I have, that prolonged avoidance of ritualized corporate information is as satisfactory as giving up cigarettes…good for the heart and lungs and good for the head.
Anyone with OCD will tell you this did not need to be studied. I had been in therapy for OCD for years but it was when I first took Klonopin and my OCD vanished that I knew there was this link to anxiety (Gluamate/GABA imbalance).
Does this mean I have a disorder. Nope. It means I am just a human with the genetics that means I need more ritual and stability in my life. None of which is favored by capitalism.
I was excited to read this essay because of my interest in repetitive human interactions. Unfortunately, in their work to understand human and social behaviors, the quest for “hard science” data took precedence, and this research work has transposed superstition with ritual.
A surprising misuse of words at a large scale: the researchers titled their book with the wrong word.
superstition:
excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings: he dismissed the ghost stories as mere superstition.
• a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief: she touched her locket for luck, a superstition she had had since childhood.
ritual:
a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order: the role of ritual in religion | the ancient rituals of Christian worship.
• the prescribed order of performing a ceremony, especially one characteristic of a particular religion or church: she likes the High Church ritual.
• a series of actions or type of behavior regularly and invariably followed by someone: her visits to Joy became a ritual.
So, yes, indeed, the researchers are pursuing a deeper understanding of how superstition operates. Unfortunately they use the wrong word and demean ceremonies and behaviors of a disagreeable subset of fellow humans. It is quite likely disrespecting people and behaviors the researchers don’t like. How better to demean all kinds of religions by telling them they utilize false beliefs?
More importantly with their confusion of words in the English language, these researchers add to societal anxieties because they instill an offensive miscommunication of their own ideas, yet much more significantly, obfuscate science itself.
About repetitive human interactions.
The interactions do not need to be the same; they do not need to be with the same people, yet the frequency matters. It is repetitive interactions between humans and spaces that create social phenomena.
Certainly sometimes, if such repetitive interactions develop in certain ways, repetitive interactions can become ceremonies. And if ceremonies evolve in certain ways they can become rituals and even superstitions. For example, in early human settlements, priests predicted when to plant and harvest. And often it was based on superstitions or studied weather patterns mixed with superstitions.
In our current world with anxiety and stress being prevalent, some amount of ceremony is probably helpful to people and their communities.
Now just imagine if we had a king sitting at the Lincoln temple in DC and every week the president will go through an elaborated ritual to account for what good deeds he did for the nation.
That will keep em humble and might have even made Trump palatable.
Consider the way modern ‘best practices’ are transformed into rituals which are at least rationally developed, like a pilot’s checklist. These checklists are arguably developed by a historical process of trial and error, and represent a cumulative memory, even when specifics are forgotten — non superstitious rituals based on observed/inferred causal agency.
So why would pigeons develop best practices? We know that the subject’s behavior has nothing to do with the delivery of the reward, but the subject doesn’t. In the absence of counterexamples, it makes sense for the subject to assume some agency, and try to determine its leverage. The alternative, to assume helplessness, would not be conducive to discovering actual mechanisms, like a literal pellet lever. So the emergence of ritualized behavior in the face of random stimulus seems like a problem-solving method for benefitting from unknown levels of causal agency.
Nice point! We learn without intending to do so.
On another facet, I was just struck by how Lambert’s favorite “performative political performances” fall into the domain of ritual. Like pigeons in a Skinner box, they adopt rituals they uncertainly yet hopefully perceive to be rewarding. Per my earlier comment, TDS seems to be an example.
Being vaccinated for COVID has become a ritual of sorts for some people. They barely consider whether or not the shots work as advertised, but they gain comfort by being inoculated with a foreign substance advertised as providing a benefit to them. So as soon as a new shot is available they rush out to get it.
Thanks for the article and the comments, really interesting stuff. Another angle on the efficacy of ritual is that it isn’t necessarily intended to effect consensus (material) reality by altering the chain of causality, although that is often the case, but rather to deal with the subjective states of the organism engaging in it. When the pigeons come to learn that food will be arriving or when the children come to learn that toys are on offer, even when the toothache or heartache sufferer experiences their pain or the basketball player faces the challenges of the court, the rituals that follow those realizations are a way of shaping, compartmentalizing, organizing that reaction for it’s own sake and on it’s own terms, as a thing independent of the notion of a reward.
Ritual is also a way for a large number of people to synchronize to a common purpose. Confucian thought places value on ritual as a socialization tool. You can see examples of ritual used as a socialization tool in many settings, For example, during the funeral of Elizabeth II, you could see the lockstep, incremental tolling of the bell, etc., used to create a common expression of grieving.
Less benevolently, you can see examples of ritual to suppress individuality in a number of historical and contemporary settings. The synchronized moment becomes paramount, superseding the expression of individual impulses in those settings.