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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RitualModes (Divergent modes of ritual, social cohesion, prosociality, and conflict.)

Teaser

Summary

This Project aims to establish an authoritative scientific framework for understanding the relationship between group ritual, social cohesion, and pro-group behaviour.
Rituals have shaped human societies for millennia, but the exact social consequences of rituals are poorly understood. This project seeks to identify the fundamental components of rituals worldwide and chart their effects on patterns of group alignment and action. The project has three tightly linked objectives.
â€¢ Objective 1 explores the psychological mechanisms underlying ritualsâ€™ effects on group cohesion and behaviour in ten nations
â€¢ Objective 2 focuses on the ritual dynamics of special populations exposed to group-related violence (e.g., war veterans, ex-convicts, war-torn communities)
â€¢ Objective 3 examines the functions of ritual and cohesion in cultural group selection
These research objectives aim to provide insights into key questions (e.g., what are the fundamental building blocks of group rituals?), understudied groups (e.g., revolutionary combatants), and unresolved debates in many fields (e.g., what motivates self-sacrifice?).
This is a five-year project involving collaboration with anthropologists, psychologists, historians, archaeologists, and evolutionary theorists from around the world with data collection in Brazil, Japan, USA, Libya, Cameroon, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and Vanuatu.

Work performed

Objective 1. Highlights include a large preregistered longitudinal study (N=1015) published in Self & Identity (2019) on how the US inauguration ceremony impacted Americansâ€™ bonds to their ingroups and outgroups. Another large preregistered study (N=700+) involving online experiments examining the effects of doctrinal ritual dynamics on transmission fidelity was published in the influential interdisciplinary journal Cognition (2018). In Indonesia we ran a large study (N=1334) with a variety of Islamist organizations, exploring the interaction of ritual practices, fusion, and parochial or extreme beliefs (one manuscript published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (2019) and another under review at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin). We have also collected over 600 detailed accounts of ritual experiences from individuals in Japan, India, and America used in a study recently accepted in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Objective 2. Highlights include a major paper in Nature: Scientific Reports (2017), using a mathematical model of the evolution of violent self-sacrifice for the group to generate predictions tested empirically with samples of military veterans, participants in hazing rituals, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and a large sample of twins. This research helps to explain willingness to fight and die for the group and has important implications for tackling sectarianism, gang-related violence, and suicide terrorism. It contributed also to the creation of an overarching theoretical framework published as a target article with commentaries in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2018) in which Whitehouse set out the latest version of the modes theory focusing heavily on imagistic practices in a range of special populations, from suicide terrorists to tribal warriors, and from religious fundamentalists to football hooligans. Other outputs include articles in: Brain and Behaviour (2018) reporting the results of brain scans of football fans when playing an economic game with supporters of their own team versus rival teams, investigating the neural mechanisms linking fusion to outgroup hostility; Self & Identity (in press) examining the difficulties of resolving conflicts amongst supports of rival sports teams when identity fusion is coupled with high levels of inter-group threat; Frontiers in Ecology & Evolution examining how imagistic experiences can augment fusion and turn viral moments of social engagement into sustained altruistic movements; Evolution Human Behaviour (under revision) aimed at understanding how fusion motivates extreme violence amongst football hooligans so as to develop future interventions to reduce conflict. Several more studies examining imagistic experiences and fusion dynamics in applied settings (e.g., parolee and ex-combatant re-integration, improving community trust, etc.) are underway or near completion and one is currently under review in the journal Punishment and Society.

Objective 3. Highlights include papers in two of the worldâ€™s foremost scientific journals. The first, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (2018) sought to establish core features in the evolution of social complexity worldwide, that would allow us subsequently to assess the contributions of ritual to these processes. We systematically coded data on 414 societies in 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. In a second paper in Nature (2019) we examined the role of religion and ritual in the evolution of social complexity. The main finding was that belief in moralizing gods followed the expansion of human societies, rather than being pivotal for the evolution of social complexity.

Final results

The project has gone beyond the state of the art by studying highly specialized and difficult-to-access populations, including: a unique sample of boundary-crossing leaders from around the world; a large sample of donors to wildlife conservation following the illegal killing of a lion known as Cecil by an American bow-hunter; parolees in Australia, allowing us to explore how rituals and shared experiences can contribute to reform; farmers and herders in Cameroon, allowing us to examine the effects of different rituals on both ingroup cohesion and outgroup hostility. Another notable feature of our project its focus on the wider societal implications of ritual events, such as the Trump inauguration ceremony in the USA and the Brexit referendum in the UK, which for American democrats and British â€˜remainâ€™ supporters were both highly dysphoric rituals. Our research is providing deeper insight in to how such events contribute to social cohesion within the same camp but also to deeper divisions in society at large. Another example would be our study of transformative rituals and social bonding among offenders on the UKâ€™s famous Twinning Project, a nationwide scheme pairing prisons with football clubs to tackle recidivism. Finally, our project has gone beyond the state of the art in pioneering the largest ever database of global history and developing new methods of addressing data quality issues when analysing historical data quantitatively. This involved setting up one of the worldâ€™s largest ever collaborations among humanities scholars using an open science framework.