The Psychology of Ritual: An Empirical Investigation of Ritual’s Regulatory Functions and Psychological Processes

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal properties driving this puzzling yet universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, the aim of this dissertation was twofold: First, I propose an integrative theoretical framework of ritual that organIntroizes recent empirical work from psychology and the cognitive and neuroscience fields. In this framework I propose that all ritual serves three regulatory functions. Namely, rituals regulate (1) social behaviors, (2) goal states, and (3) emotions. I explain each function by drawing on bottom-up and top-down processes, and suggest that all forms of ritual are a result of some combination of these two levels of psychological processing. Second, I use the framework to generate testable predictions and outline seven experiments as part of this research program. In Studies 1 and 2, I found evidence that novel rituals strengthen ingroup ties but at the expense of outgroup distrust (Study 1), a bias response that is amplified as a ritual becomes more effortful (Study 2). In Study 3, I found that minor variations in the amount of (mis)matching in a ritual sequence predicts differences in group functioning. In Studies 4 and 5, I found evidence to suggest that how a ritual is created, in terms of its physical features, depends on the underlying motivational context (Study 4). As a built-in regulatory mechanism, the embodiment of ritual allows a group to anticipate future goal states, with physical styles of ritual either helping or hindering collective performance (Study 5). The last two studies examined the role that personal ritual plays in mitigating anxiety. In Study 6, I found that ritual is capable of muting the neuroaffective response to failure. Finally, the findings from Study 7 suggest that ritualized movements minimize anxiety by blocking out surrounding emotional stimuli. The current research contributes to the growing interest in the psychology of ritual. Together, by appreciating the value of psychological theory and experimental methods, the current dissertation broadens our understanding of ritual and human behavior more generally.

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Hobson, Nicholas Murray

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Inzlicht, Michael

• emotions
• group bias
• group processes
• joint coordination
• performance
• ritual

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/89646

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/89646