Estimated Costs and Benefits of Extreme Rituals in Mauritius
Why do people willingly engage in painful or exhausting rituals with no obvious material reward?
How to measure ritual attendance accurately?
Despite the general criticisms of self-reports pointing out problems due to memory and cultural biases, self-reports remain a widespread method for assessing ritual attendance such as churchgoing. During an eight-month-long observation in a Fijian village, John Shaver, Thomas White, Patrick Vakaoti, and Martin Lang measured how self-report methods correlate with actual church attendance of the local population.
They found that self-report measures do not predict ritual attendance measured by observation and that people with parental duties were more likely to over-report their ritual attendance. Furthermore, the data suggested that third-part ratings of a person’s religiosity were the best predictor of that person’s frequency of ritual attendance.
You can find the article here:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257160
