Why do people willingly engage in painful or exhausting rituals with no obvious material reward?
In a new paper by LEVYNA team, we expand the costly signalling theory of religion by examining how participants themselves evaluate ritual participation. Using the Thaipusam Kavadi festival in Mauritius as a case study, we show that what makes such signals reliable markers of commitment is not shared perceptions of “cost,” but differences in perceived benefits.
For insiders—those who believe in the ritual’s spiritual efficacy—participation brings both cooperative and supernatural benefits. Outsiders, who do not share these expectations, see no comparable gains, making the same act appear irrational or “too costly.”
Our findings suggest that religious and cooperative signals persist not because everyone agrees on their difficulty, but because participants and observers compute their value differently.
Read the full study here:
Part of the Signaler Psychology project:
Recent article in journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, where LEVYNA members contributed data, asks whether religious denominations accumulate gradually or are generated in rapid bursts associated with specific historical events.
A recently published qualitative study by Jana Nenadalová explores Dark therapy, an alternative spiritual practice combining prolonged sensory deprivation with guidance from an authority figure, to understand how religious and spiritual experiences are induced. Drawing on predictive processing theory, the research shows that complete darkness can trigger intense psychological and perceptual phenomena, especially when participants feel a sense of control and bring expectations or prior beliefs into the experience.
