The evolution of human ritual behavior as a cooperative signaling platform
The aim of this project is to create an interdisciplinary evolutionary model of ritual behavior, which will be based on four tiers of evidence, each guided by concrete hypotheses (see section 4). That is, we will systematically synthetize evidence from four fields that are essential for the understanding of human evolution: (1) ethnography, (2) psychology, (3) paleoarchaeology, and (4) primatology, and use this evidence to test the assumptions of our model. Put differently, to understand the evolution of ritual, we will: (1) consider the typical context in which collective ritual occurs and (2) investigate the mechanisms that ritual behavior activates to promote social functioning, assuming that these contexts resemble (3) adaptive challenges during the formative period of anatomically modern humans who possessed (4) rudimentary communication mechanisms. While we have studied individual ritual mechanisms before, this project will unify and extend our previous findings by creating a coherent evolutionary model that will account for the rise and persistence of basic ritual forms; especially those features that seemingly contradict the ultimate adaptive functions. Such a model will shed light on the evolution of human ritual behavior in both its ultimate and proximate functions and due to its inherent interdisciplinarity, the model will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars studying ritual behavior and cooperative communication, which are both essential for the understanding of our species’ success.
Ritual evolution was a two-year project (2018-2020) funded by the Czech Science Foundation.
The Team
Research Outpus
The evolution of human ritual behavior as a cooperative signaling platform
Collective ritual is virtually omnipresent across past and present human cultures and is thought to play an essential role in facilitating cooperation, yet little is known about its evolution in the hominin lineage. We examine whether collective ritual could have evolved as a complex signaling system facilitating mutualistic cooperation under socio-ecological pressures in the Pleistocene. Specifically, we identify similarity, coalitional, and commitment signals as the building blocks of the contemporary signaling systems in hunter-gatherers and trace the presence of these signals in non-human primates and the hominin archaeological and paleoanthropological record. Next, we establish the underlying cognitive mechanisms facilitating these signals and review the evidence of the earliest presence of these mechanisms as well as evidence for selective pressures on the evolution of cooperative communication. The synthesis of these streams of evidence suggests that ritualized cooperative signals might have first evolved in the Early Pleistocene in the form of similarity signals, whereas coalitional and commitment signals would start appearing in the early and late Middle Pleistocene until, eventually, coalescing into a signaling system. By the arrival of H. sapiens, it is possible that collective ritual as a staged and repetitively performed signaling act constituted an important adaptation facilitating collective action.
Evolutionary, Cognitive, and Contextual Approaches to the Study of Religious Systems: A Proposition of Synthesis
The explanatory gap between the life sciences and the humanities that is present in the study of human phenomena impedes productive interdisciplinary examination that such a complex subject requires. Manifested as epistemological tensions over reductionism vs. holism, nature vs. nurture, and the study of micro vs. macro context, the divergent research approaches in the humanities and the sciences produce separate bodies of knowledge that are difficult to reconcile. To remedy this incommensurability, the article proposes to employ the complex adaptive systems approach, which allows to study specific cultural systems in their ecologies and to account for the myriads of factors that constitute such systems, including nonlinear interactions between these factors and their evolution. On a specific example of religious systems, we show that by studying cultural systems in their contextual variability, mechanistic composition, and evolutionary history, the humanities and the sciences should be able to fruitfully collaborate while avoiding previous pitfalls of excessive reductionism, genetic determinism, and sweeping overgeneralizations, on the one hand, and pitfalls of excessive holism, cultural determinism, and aversion to any generalizations, on the other hand.
The evolutionary paths to collective rituals : An interdisciplinary perspective on the origins and functions of the basic social act
The present article is an elaborated and upgraded version of the Early Career Award talk that I delivered at the IAPR 2019 conference in Gdańsk, Poland. In line with the conference’s thematic focus on new trends and neglected themes in psychology of religion, I argue that psychology of religion should strive for firmer integration with evolutionary theory and its associated methodological toolkit. Employing evolutionary theory enables to systematize findings from individual psychological studies within a broader framework that could resolve lingering empirical contradictions by providing an ultimate rationale for which results should be expected. The benefits of evolutionary analysis are illustrated through the study of collective rituals and, specifically, their purported function in stabilizing risky collective action. By comparing the socio-ecological pressures faced by chimpanzees, contemporary hunter-gatherers, and early Homo, I outline the selective pressures that may have led to the evolution of collective rituals in the hominin lineage, and, based on these selective pressures, I make predictions regarding the different functions and their underlying mechanisms that collective rituals should possess. While examining these functions, I echo the Early Career Award and focus mostly on my past work and the work of my collaborators, showing that collective rituals may stabilize risky collective action by increasing social bonding, affording to assort cooperative individuals, and providing a platform for reliable communication of commitment to group norms. The article closes with a discussion of the role that belief in superhuman agents plays in stabilizing and enhancing the effects of collective rituals on trust-based cooperation.