Culture, Cognition, and Ritual

Rituals are abundant in nature and ubiquitous across human cultures. At first glance, they appear wasteful, as they require significant investments of time, effort, and resources but offer no directly obvious benefits. Yet, they are deeply meaningful to practitioners and tightly integrated in cultural normative systems. While social scientific theories have argued that they play important roles, those theories have only recently been tested. This chapter discusses what ritual is and what it does, both at an individual and at a group level, drawing from an interdisciplinary research program that combines ethnographic and experimental methodologies. It argues that rituals are pervasive because they constitute useful mental and social technologies that can be employed to solve important problems for practitioners and their communities.