Estimated Costs and Benefits of Extreme Rituals in Mauritius
Why do people willingly engage in painful or exhausting rituals with no obvious material reward?
In an incentivized controlled lab experiment published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, Miloš Fišar together with members of LEVYNA and other colleagues show that there are no systematic effects of ovulatory shift on salient behavioral outcomes like risk preferences, rule violation, and exploratory attitude.
Some evolutionary psychology theories suggests that the impact of ovulatory shift on behavioral outcomes may play an important role in economic decision-making. The authors of the study run an incentivized controlled lab experiment with 124 naturally cycling females to test these effects. Using a within-subjects design, they compared different phases of the menstruation cycle of their participants and found no systematic differences in their risk-taking, rule-violating, and exploring behaviors.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487023000570?via%3Dihub
Why do people willingly engage in painful or exhausting rituals with no obvious material reward?