Paper short abstract:

There are compelling hypotheses about ritual in creating groups and fuelling conflict. Research suggests that rituals not only demarcate groups but varying features of rituals produces different scales/intensities of group alignment, suited to addressing distinct collective action problems

Paper long abstract:

Field research in anthropology has generated some compelling hypotheses about the role of ritual in creating group cohesion and fuelling intergroup conflict. In recent years, efforts have been made to test many of those hypotheses scientifically. This talk provides an overview of research conducted at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at the University of Oxford, using a range of methods, from carefully controlled psychological experiments to the analysis of large longitudinal datasets. This research suggests that rituals not only demarcate cultural groups but varying the frequency and emotionality of collective rituals produces different scales and intensities of group alignment, suited to addressing distinct kinds of collective action problems.

Paper short abstract:

Memories of experiences of high-arousal religious rituals become important emotional symbols through unusually large increases in dopamine. This dopamine theory explains not only the ongoing motivation of participants, but also informs theories about the evolution of the earliest forms of religion.

Paper long abstract:

Previously, I have argued that high-arousal religious rituals become important parts of the ritual participants' life stories through narrative processing, and by virtue of the highly emotional content of the memories (van Mulukom, 2017). What was missing from this account are the exact mechanisms by which the emotion of memories of high-arousal rituals are processed, and by which the memories become highly significant, continuing to motivate ritual participants long after the experience has taken place.

In this paper, I will lay out the psychological pathway of how high-arousal religious rituals become important emotional symbols, with a focus on how emotions function together with memories in the brain. I will argue that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a pivotal role in this process, together with two brain structures in the limbic system: the amygdala and the hippocampus.

Finally, I will extend this dopamine theory of religious rituals to explanations as to how this would have been important in the evolution of religion: I will suggest that the earliest forms of religion likely involved rituals that induced states of trance (such as in imagistic, shamanic religions), and that such states are particular adept at producing dopamine surges, which in turn would have imbued the ritual experiences with high levels of significance.

Paper short abstract:

Although greeting is well studied in many species leave-taking has been largely ignored. In the first cross-species study on leave-taking I seek to identify its evolutionary origins: does it relate to the risk of separation, or play a functional role in maintaining cohesion?

Paper long abstract:

Humans universally greet when they meet one another and have rituals of leave-taking when they part. These every day rituals are so ingrained in our social exchanges that they have been termed "bookends of interaction". Greeting rituals have been well studied in human societies as well as across the animal kingdom, however studies of leave-taking are entirely absent when looking beyond humans. Human rituals are known to have been important in our evolution and can involve adaptive functions to generate cohesion and social bonding, thus an investigation into one of our most frequently occurring rituals is long overdue. In the first cross-species study on leave-taking I seek to identify its evolutionary origins: whether it has a functional mechanism for group cohesion or has evolved as a by-product of being apart in spatially dispersed populations. This will be conducted through a cross-cultural, cross-species analysis in four species: humans (Homo sapiens), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) and vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythus). Together video footage will be analysed to determine whether markers of leave-taking exist, if they relate to the risk of separation, or play a functional role in maintaining cohesion.

Paper short abstract:

This talk uses football fans to illustrate cognitive understandings of ritual. How do shared ritual experiences (i.e. matches) facilitate group bonding? What effects do these bonds have on group behaviours? And can ritual be used to tackle football violence and disorder?

Paper long abstract:

Rituals act as markers of group identity and within-group commitment. They can occur in secular contexts, such as sporting events. Football matches frequently attract tens of thousands of fans, who: engage in specific traditions and ritualised group responses (e.g. 'Mexican waves'); use symbols which are accorded sacred status (e.g. club crest); respect a hierarchy of officials, regulating conventions, and taboos; and experience a deeply emotional participation in the event.

Using research conducted among British, Brazilian, Australian, and Indonesian fans, I discuss how shared ritual experiences facilitate group bonding. For example, the euphoria associated with positive match outcomes may be an obvious path to group bonding (often heightened by synchronised actions, e.g. clapping and chanting). Nonetheless, the dysphoria of defeat appears to be particularly powerful in generating an intense, long-lasting form of group cohesion. In this case, particularly harrowing group events bind fans through a process of reflection and self-transformation, which creates a more porous boundary between personal and group identities. This is termed identity fusion.

Football fans also have a notorious reputation for violence and disorder in many parts of the world. Evidence from four continents indicates that identity fusion is a key psychological factor motivating football-related violence and disorder, particularly when highly 'fused' fans experience a threat to their group. Finally, I will discuss the evolution of ritual, its role in cooperation, and how ritual could be used to harness the actions of fused fans for more positive social outcomes.

Paper short abstract:

As a ritualised behaviour that brings people together in shared space and time, dance appears to serve a social bonding function with may have evolutionary value. This study investigates the contributions of shared experience and synchronisation of movement to the social bonding effect of dancing.

Paper long abstract:

Dance may serve a social bonding function as a ritualised behaviour that brings people together in shared space and time. Previous research has suggested that the social bonding effect of dance may be due to synchronised movement, however they have mostly involved highly controlled laboratory settings, in which participants engage in simple periodic movements like finger tapping. From the perspective of embodied music cognition, dance is more than just synchronisation to music, but may also involve expression of emotion and creativity in a shared space. Both the sharing of emotional expression and synchronisation of movement may lead to social bonding, and may be important features in the anthropological study of dance as a ritual.

To attempt to distinguish between time and space, this study utilised a silent disco experimental paradigm. Participants danced in pairs while wearing headphones, allowing timing of the music to be manipulated between within the pair, to force them to dance either in or out-of-time with each other. It was found that pairs experienced a greater sense of affiliation while in the synchronous condition, compared to an asynchronous condition in which one was consistently a quarter-beat out of phase. This self-reported result was supported by behavioural measurements recorded in motion capture. The present study suggests that, although the exact nature of dance movements may change, timing is everything in dance. Implications for our understanding of the evolution of ritual will be discussed.

Paper short abstract:

I will discuss the role ritualized action has played in the development of human culture. Specifically, how the cognitive interpretation of ritualized actions may have facilitated the formation of groups and material culture, and led to 'ritual' itself.

Paper long abstract:

Ritualized actions are actions which are repetitive, redundant, formalized, stereotypic, and instrumentally inefficient. Naïve individuals observing such actions have difficulty in determining the causal relations [of the actions], as well as the underlying intention of the performer. These interpretive difficulties are referred to as 'causal opacity' and 'goal demotion'. Ritualized actions are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of 'ritual' more generally (which is regarded as having symbolic qualities held in common by a specific group).

Ritualized actions appear to drive predictable and evolutionarily relevant behaviours in observers. In both adults and children, the observation of such actions motivates individuals to copy what they observe (including the ritualized actions themselves). This phenomenon is referred to as 'over-imitation', and is underpin by both the ritual- and instrumental-stance - cognitive accounts describing the attributions observers make regarding ritualized behaviour. These theories in conjunction may provide an account for the early utility of ritualized action as culture was emerging in the Homo lineage - specifically, the formation of groups, the transmission of material culture, and the acquisition of group-specific norms and beliefs - and may have been co-opted into the larger, more symbolically rich, phenomenon of 'ritual'.

I propose to discuss these theoretical claims, and elaborate on the role they may have played in the emergence of ritual more generally.