Cross-Cultural Ritual Intuitions and Collective Action: Exploring preferences in four countries.

Anthropologists have long recognized that collective rituals promote social cohesion and cooperation. But do people intuitively know what kinds of rituals they should perform to produce distinct socially useful outcomes? It is not obvious that this should be the case. For example, rituals might have acquired their social functions through a winnowing process of cultural group selection or due to top-down control by elites. In this cross-cultural study, we explored intuitions about which rituals would be best suited to resolve a variety of collective action problems. We conducted a cross-cultural, preregistered study, with over 2,700 participants recruited from the US, UK, India, and Japan. Our findings demonstrated a cross-culturally consistent preference for low arousal doctrinal and celebratory procession rituals. We also found scenario specific effects, with confessional rituals preferred in scenarios involving intragroup conflict, and divination rituals featuring more prominently in scenarios that involved environmental uncertainties. Cultural differences were also evident with the US and UK samples showing a pronounced preference for rituals more commonly associated with Christianity, whereas Japan and India displayed less scenario-specific variation but much greater diversity of choice overall. Greater exposure to media portrayals of rituals was also associated with the selection of more sensational rituals, a phenomenon we dub the 'Indiana Jones effect.' Surprisingly, religious upbringing and beliefs only had a limited impact on choices. Our study underscores the balance between cross-culturally recurrent norms and intuitions concerning rituals and more locally or regionally distinctive ideas, contributing to a fuller understanding of how rituals acquire their social functions.