An experimental examination of object-directed ritualized action in children across two cultures

Children's distinct drive to reproduce costly rituals

Costly rituals are ubiquitous and adaptive. Yet, little is known about how children develop to acquire them. The current study examined children's imitation of costly rituals. Ninety-three 4-6 year olds (47 girls, 45% Oceanians, tested in 2022) were shown how to place tokens into a tube to earn stickers, using either a ritualistic or non-ritualistic costly action sequence. Children shown the ritualistic actions imitated faithfully at the expense of gaining stickers; conversely, those shown the non-ritualistic actions ignored them and obtained maximum reward. This highlights how preschool children are adept at and motivated to learn rituals, despite significant material cost. This study provides insights into the early development of cultural learning and the adaptive value of rituals in group cognition.

Cognitive prerequisites for cumulative culture are context-dependent: Children's potential for ratcheting depends on cue longevity

Human cumulative culture has been suggested to depend on human-unique cognitive mechanisms, explaining its apparent absence in other species. We show that the potential for exhibiting cumulative culture depends on the cognitive abilities of the agents and the demands associated with using information generated by others' activity. 154 children aged 3-6 years played a searching game ("Find the Treasure"), taking their turn after a puppet demonstrator. The puppet's attempt revealed information about the contents of the locations searched, which could be exploited to target rewarded locations, and avoid unrewarded ones. Two conditions were presented, intended to capture realistic variation in the transience of the cues generated by another individual's activity. In one condition, the puppet's demonstration provided transient information - boxes were opened, seen to be rewarded or not, and then closed. In the other condition the puppet's chosen boxes remained partially open, providing an enduring visible cue as to whether that location was rewarded. Children undertook three trials of varying demonstration success, and we used patterns of performance to infer the potential for improvement over multiple generations of transmission. In the Enduring Cues condition, children's performance demonstrated the potential for cumulative culture. In contrast, in the Transient Information condition, only older children showed improved performances following higher success demonstrations and overall performance was not compatible with the possibility of improvements over generations of social transmission. We conclude that under certain conditions cumulative culture could occur in many species, but in a broader range of contexts in humans.

A sacred commitment: How rituals promote group survival

Religious groups have survived for thousands of years despite drastic changes in society. One reason for their successful survival is the proliferation of group rituals (i.e. meaningful sequences of actions characterized by rigidity, formality, and repetition). We propose that rituals enhance religious group survival not only by signaling external commitment but also by fostering internal commitment toward the group in three ways: (1) enhancing belief in the group's values ('committed cognition'), (2) increasing the desire to maintain membership in the group ('committed affect'), and (3) increasing contributions to the welfare of the group ('committed behavior'). We conclude with a call for new empirical research on how participating in rituals can enhance internal commitment toward one's group (116/120).

Ritual as resource management

This paper argues that rituals are mechanisms of resource management. The argument is based on four observations: (i) over the course of hominin evolution, fitness became contingent on psychological states; (ii) these psychological states can be understood as 'resources', not unlike material resources such as energy, food or fuel; (iii) ritual 'manages' these psychological resources-meaning that it cultivates, builds and directs them; and (iv) ritual management can be analytically decomposed, providing a new descriptive tool for understanding rituals and predictions about ritual survival. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.