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.
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
