Ritual and Prosociality

Costly Signalling Account

Terminology: rituals and prosociality

Costly rituals and prosociality: evidence

Costly signalling and rituals

Stotting

Problems with the costly signalling account

Psychological Kinship Account

Kinship mechanisms

Phenotypic cues: costumes, synchrony

Contextual cues: intense shared experiences

Fusion

Equivalent in natural world

Biological puzzle - similar to rituals

  • Expend unnecessary energy
  • More visible

Stotting serves this function: only fit gazelle can afford the costs associated with stotting

Signaling

Sender emits signals that exaggerate his/her qualities

Receiver "discounts" signals as appropriate

Reliable, hard to fake signal

Cost may authenticate a resource or intention because waste is the luxury only the resource rich or predictably committed can afford

Verbally expressed beliefs > deception

Humans evolved cog. mechanisms that privilege behavioural commitment over verbal commitment

Difficult to fake cog. intent in behavioural commitment

Costly rituals = hard to fake signals that authenticate commitment to a common morality, enhancing solidarity and trust

Need accurate signals to allocate resources and power

Costly rituals authenticate commitment and secure cooperation, enhancing the survival prospects of the groups

Therefore more likely to outlast other groups

Also cultural means to generating affiliation

E.g. Bullet ant ritual

Sosis (2000)

Comparative study - 200 religious and secular communes

Religious communes = 2+ costly requirements on their members as secular communes

Sosis & Bressler (2003)

Religious communities = more likely to outlast non-religious counterparts - 4x as likely in given year

No. of costly requirements in religious communes = +ively correlated with group lifespan

Behavioural Studies

Ritual

Stable object of analysis in the first place?

A religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order

Causal opacity: ritual behaviours = assumed by Ps and observed alike to lack specifiable causal structure and have no knowable instrumental connections to end goals, if indeed any are imputed to them

Including phenomena - synchronic movement, causally opaque action, and both euphoric and dysphoric arousal

Prosociality

Furthers interest of social group

Blogowska et al., (2013)

Religiosity predicted helping of an in-group member (volunteering time to take part in a study)

Aggression towards a member of moral out-group (gay target)

Punishing someone from moral out-group = prosocial?

Behavioural studies have examined whether participation in costly rituals promotes prosocial behaviour

Clearly and unambiguously antisocial

Sosis & Ruffle (2003)

Participants: members of religious and secular Israeli kibbutzim

Experimental economic game: how much to withdraw and keep? If withdrawals = more than 100 then players get nothing, if equal or less than 100 then players keep withdrawals and remainder x1.5 and split

Results

Less money withdrawn in religious

Freq of engagement in rituals -ively predicted amount withdrawn

Soler (2012)

Costly signalling in northeastern Brazil - communities with religion that originated from enslaved Africans transported to Brazil during the slave trade

Believe in powerful God served by lesser deities

Measure of costly behaviours - completed religious signalling scale, measuring costly signals of religiousity

DV = Public goods game

Results

Higher CRSS scores = more cooperative in PGG

Reported receiving more cooperation from fellow religious community members

Xygalatas et al. (2013)

Two rituals in an annual Hindu festival

1 = low ordeal ritual involving singing and collective prayer

2 = high ordeal ritual involving body piercing, carrying heavy bamboo structures, and dragging carts attached by hooks to the skin for hours before climbing a mountain to reach a temple

Method: following ritual, questionnaire in room near temple, paid 200 rupees for participating, opportunity to anon donate this to temple

Results

High ordeal donated sig. more

Higher levels of self reported pain = greater donations

Causality

Costly ritual > prosocial behaviour OR prosocial disposition > costly ritual

More prosocial ps are likely to undertake the high ordeal ritual because they are prosocial?

Bastian, Jetten & Ferris (2014)

Pain induction - induced pain in uni students: hands in ice water, perform leg squats, eat chilli pepper (in small groups)

Pain vs non-pain conditions

Economic game

Ps choose number between 1 and 7

7 = highest pay off but only if call other group members chose 7 too

If differ, lower numbers = higher pay off

1 = least cooperative - ps get max., group get min.

7 = cooperative but risk if group defects

Higher score = more cooperative

Pain condition chose higher numbers

Causality

Hard to fake?

Voluntary?

Shared experience

If costly rituals are signals prosociality, why should emitting signal increase prosocial?

Signal of prosociality is reliable only to the extent that it is costlier to fake by potential freeloaders than for cooperators

what prevents selfish impostors from faking prosocial intent by emitting the signal?

Costly rituals are often compulsory, which undermines their value as a signal of commitment

Shared traumatic experiences can bond people together

Such experiences create the group rather than signalling commitment to a pre-existing group

Kin recognition in humans depends on cues that cultural traditions can mimic and exploit > force cooperation

Two broad types

Direct, phenotypic cues e.g. visual similarity to self

Indirect, contextual cues: e.g. co-residence early in life, same caregivers

Involve artificial phenotypic cues of kinship

Simliar costumes, headdress, face/body paint > visual

Rituals can exploit kinships mechanisms

Synchrony

= key features of many rituals

Foster tight ties + cooperative intent

Hypothesised to promote group cohesion

Synchronic movement increases cooperation among participants

& Destructive obedience

Political figures (Hitler/Mussolini) incorporated synchrony into political gatherings

Wiltermuth (2012)

Follow experimenter around campus - synchrony, out-of-phase, neutral

Then perform task to understand physiological responses to performing "tasks that people in some parts of the world may find objectionable"

Wiltermuth & Heath (2009)

Results

In-sync = more bugs in grinders

Therefore more susceptible to following orders

Grinding up bugs - no. of bugs inserted into grinder = measure o obedience

Valdesolo & DeSteno (2011)

Ps tapped to recorded tone

Confederate tapped either in and out of sync with the focal point

Ps perceived synchronous others as more similar to them than asynchronous ps

Synchronous others also evoked more comparison when assigned an arduous task, and ps were more likely to help them with task

Fischer et al. (2013)

Investigated effects of nine naturally occurring rituals on prosociality

Rituals synchrony increased perceptions of oneness with others

Synchronous body movements were likely to enhance prosocial attitudes

Interpersonal multi-sensory-stimulation experiments - Visuotactile synchrony causes Ps to perceive others as both more physically and psychologically similar to themselves

Sharon-David et al. (2018)

Intimacy higher following synchronised versus unsynchronised interactions

e.g. same-sex strangers peddled bikes in either sync or not while discussing personal events, then rated how intimacy they see

Co-Ps in intense arousing rituals may gain a quantity of shared experience normally possible to accumulate only through large number of shared interactions

Such rituals may function as a contextual cue to kinship, contributing to group cohesion by fostering a sense of "fusion" with the collective

E.g. military > hazing

Merging of personal and social identities, visceral sense of oneness, shared essence, reciprocal strength, feeling invulnerability

Distinct, both conceptually and empirically, from Group Identification

Social Identification vs. Fusion

Identification - depersonalisation, group eclipses person & relationships

Fusion - Personal levels remain agentic and influential, allowing relational ties between group members, as well as collective, ties to operate

Measuring

Pictorial (Swann et al., 2009)

Fusion and Self-Sacrifice

Choose the option that best represents your relationship with the group

Venn-diagram

Verbal (Gomez et al., 2011)

I am one with my country
I am strong because of my country
I make my country strong

Trolley-Problem

Swann et al. (2010)

If fused with group = more likely to sacrifice one-self to save in-group members

When not fused = more likely to let 5 in-group members die

& Extreme Pro-Group Behaviour

Fusion = potent predictor of extreme sacrifices, such as giving up one's life for the group

The act of forfeiting one's life not readily amenable to direct observation

Propensity to self-sacrifice: 7-item self-report measure of intentions to fight and die on behalf of one's group

Fusion robustly predicts responses to the fight and die measure (controlling for identification) in 11 countries spanning 6 continents

Beyond self report

Other studies have used measures of actual behaviours (less extreme)

E.g. fused spainards especially likely to donate personal funds to support financially distressed compatriots

Relational Ties

Swann et al. (2014)

Strongly fused personas care about individual members of the group as well as abstract collective

Self-reported feelings of familal connection to other group members statistically mediate links between fusion + pro-group outcomes

Fused persons view their fellow group members as kin and these perceptions motivate taking extreme actions on their behalf

Example: Boston Marathon Bombing

Americans strongly fused with US = more inclinded to provide support bombing victims

Degree to which Ps reported perceiving fellow Americans as psychological kin mediated the relationship between fusion and support behaviours