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Ritualized behaviour the hazard-precaution model General questions What are the recurrent features of ritualized behaviour? What are the causal underpinnings of the recurrent features of ritualized behaviour? Why are cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling? Theory Pascal Boyer and Pierre Linard [1, 2] have offered an explanatory account of ritualized behaviour. They note the common features of many kinds of behaviours across various domains that they claim are intuitively recognizable as ritualized. Childhood rituals, features of obsessive-compulsive disorder pathology, and many collective cultural rituals exhibit several commonalities; compulsion (it would be dangerous not to perform the action), rigidity (adherence to a particular way of performing the action), goal-demotion (action-sequences performed are divorced from their usual goals), internal repetition and redundancy (repeated enactments of identical sequences within the same ritual), a restricted range of themes (e.g. pollution and purification, danger and protection, order and boundaries). Boyer and Linard offer an integrative, explanatory model of the commonalities of ritualized behaviours in terms of their elicitation conditions and underlying cognition, their neural correlates, developmental patterns and evolutionary background. Boyer and Linard attempt to account for the features listed above, stating that these features are typically, but not always, the hallmark of ceremonies we call rituals. It is important to note that the above commonalities probably do not appear in all activities that we might wish to call rituals; conversely, there may be activities outside of what we normally think of as rituals that demonstrate ritualized behaviour (as characterized above). Cognitive Mechanisms. Of particular interest for researchers in the cognitive science of religion is Boyer and Linards neurocognitive account of collective, or cultural, ritualized behaviour. The central question they address is What are the effects of ritualized behaviour, such that individuals find collective rituals attention-grabbing and participation in such ceremonies compelling? [1]. Linard and Boyer [1] suggest that rituals are compelling because specific aspects of human cognitive architecture make these behavioural sequences attentiongrabbing, intuitively appropriate, and compelling (p. 814). The authors also identify the cognitive systems most likely to be activated by ritual performances. Note that this distinguishes their account from adaptationist models, which, for example, account for collective rituals in terms of their commitment-signalling properties and potential). Their neurocognitive model centres on what they call the hazard-precaution system (hereafter HPS). Distinct from the fearsystem, neuroscientific evidence suggests that HPS is specifically focussed on such recurrent threats as predation, intrusion by strangers, contamination, contagion, social offence, and harm to offspring. B&L claim that HPS is activated by certain features that are commonly found in cultural rituals. The model is a cultural selection model the activation of HPS is what makes certain ritualized behaviour more attention-grabbing and compelling than behaviours eliciting weaker operation of the hazard-precaution system. They identify the following as features of cultural rituals that trigger HPS.

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Occasion: ritual occasions often mark possible danger and are performed to prevent disaster/adverse circumstances (e.g. famine, illness, pollution). Danger of non-performance: people often develop the intuition if not an explicit account of the risk associated with not performing the ritual. Detailed prescriptions: Such prescriptions are the major source of security-related motifs. What are the effects of HPS activation in cultural rituals? The activation of HPS may explain further characteristics of rituals: forcing goal demotion (attention is focused on action, not on the goal of each behavioural unit) and swamping of working memory (attention is absorbed by the concern to perform the action patterns correctly, thereby precluding automatized performance). The model also accounts for the presence of complicated prescriptions, or action scripts. Among performers of compulsive rituals (i.e. OCD patients), complicated prescriptions appear to serve the function of eliminating intrusive thoughts the performance of the ritual, which must strictly adhere to the correct action-sequence, absorbs all ones attention, such that unwanted thoughts simply cannot be entertained, at least temporarily. The outcome of this, however, is often that there is a subsequent rebound of suppressed thoughts that is higher in salience. Therefore, the more the ritual is performed, the more anxious one becomes. Although these phenomena have been mainly identified and investigated in clinical contexts, B&L suggest that cultural rituals performed by cognitively normal individuals activate the same information-processing and motivation systems as patients rituals. Cultural Transmission. [R]ituals can be considered highly successful cultural gadgets whose recurrence in cultural evolution is a function of (1) how easily they are comprehended by witnesses and (2) how deeply they trigger activation of motivation systems and cognitive processes that are present in humans for other evolutionary reasons [1, p. 825]. All else being equal, cultural rituals enjoy an advantage in cultural transmission to the extent that they activate HPS. Such rituals will be more attention-grabbing and compelling than comparable rituals that do not activate HPS (or do not activate HPS to the same degree). Outstanding issues Are cultural rituals typically characterised by the features identified (i.e. compulsion, rigidity, concern with potential danger, etc.)? (See Dulaney & Fiske [3]; Fiske & Haslam [4] for survey). Are cultural rituals that more strongly activate HPS more compelling and more attention grabbing than those rituals that do not/ only weakly activate HPS? Do ceremonial scripts that include cues strongly activating HPS become more widespread?

References 1. 2. Linard, P. and P. Boyer, Whence collective rituals? A cultural selection model of ritualized behavior. American Anthropologist, 2006. 108(4): p. 814-827. Boyer, P. and P. Linard, Why ritualized behaviour? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological, and cultural rituals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2006. 29: p. 595-613.

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3. 4.

Dulaney, S. and A.P. Fiske, Cultural rituals and obsessive-compulsive disorder: is there a common psychological mechanism? Ethos, 1994. 22(3): p. 243-283. Fiske, A.P. and N. Haslam, Is obsessive-compulsive disorder a pathology of the human disposition to perform socially meaningful rituals? Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1997. 185(4): p. 211-222.

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