A new paper by the LEVYNA team develops a computational account of why rituals persist. The article brings together reinforcement learning, uncertainty, emotion, social feedback, and culturally transmitted world models.
Rituals are widespread across human societies, from everyday repeated practices to religious ceremonies, collective rites, and actions performed in situations of uncertainty. Yet ritual behavior is difficult to explain with a single mechanism. Rituals can regulate emotion, communicate commitment, coordinate groups, and express culturally shared expectations about how the world works.
In a new paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Martin Lang, Khatereh Borhani, Alexandra Ružičková, Eva Kundtová Klocová, and Radim Chvaja propose that ritual performance and persistence can be understood through reinforcement learning.
The article distinguishes between model-free and model-based processes. Model-free learning may explain how rituals become reinforced through repeated affective or social rewards, even when their instrumental consequences remain uncertain. Model-based learning helps explain how people use culturally transmitted expectations to reason about what rituals do, why they matter, and what outcomes they may produce.
This framework connects several strands of ritual research that are often treated separately: superstition and uncertainty, anxiety regulation, social bonding, costly commitment, and cultural transmission. The paper argues that rituals persist not because of a single function, but because they sit at the intersection of learning, emotion, social life, and shared cultural models.
Read the full paper here: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(26)00105-1
In a new study led by Radim Chvaja in cooperation with LEVYNA's Martin Lang, we examined how the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected religiosity in neighbouring European societies.
In a new paper published in iScience, the LEVYNA team examined whether reliable commitment signaling is driven primarily by intuitive processes or by deliberative cost-benefit reasoning.
