Ritualization reduces anxiety
Martin Lang and Radim Chvaja published a chapter discussing the relationship between ritual and anxiety in The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion.
Advertising cooperativeness
Around the world, people engage in practices that involve self-inflicted pain and apparently wasted resources, such as various religious rituals. Previous research suggests that these practices reliably communicate commitment to group cooperative norms and that benefits from increasing cooperation offset the cost of these practices.
Using a Public Goods Game, the research team shows that cooperative participants are willing to waste part of their monetary endowment to signal their intentions, and as a result, contribute more to a common group pool. By understanding factors affecting the reliability of cooperative communication, this study may help us appreciate the cooperative peculiarity of humankind.
You can find the paper here:
