Magic and ritual as affiliative strategies in response to ostracism threat

The psychological motivations underlying social learning are contested. The Bifocal Stance Theory (BST; Jagiello et al., 2022a; Whitehouse, 2021) posits that individuals adopt either a ritual stance, which prioritizes social affiliation and norm adherence, or an instrumental stance, which emphasizes efficiency in achieving goal-directed outcomes. We hypothesize that actions can be viewed by social learners through the lens of either stance depending on a variety of contextual cues. To test this hypothesis, we employed an online adaptation of the pen-and-cups paradigm (Leighton et al., 2010), in which participants (recruited from Prolific , N = 176) repeatedly observed and reproduced modeled actions. They were randomly assigned to one of four conditions ( clear-frame , expert-frame , magic-frame , or ritual-frame ), systematically manipulating verbal frames, causal opacity, goal demotion, and the resolvability of opacity (i.e. whether the causal structure was in principle knowable). The Cyberball task (a collective ball-passing activity priming ostracism threat; Williams & Jarvis, 2006) was used to investigate whether affiliative motivations influence imitative fidelity. We find that individuals experiencing ostracism exhibit higher copying fidelity for actions that are causally opaque in irresovable ways. We argue that when actions are interpreted and transmitted as “rituals” and “magic”, they serve social and affiliative functions, reinforcing group cohesion and cooperation rather than merely supporting the transmission of technically useful information. These findings challenge and extend existing accounts of cultural learning which argue that cultural transmission is primarily a matter of instrumentally directed learning. Because the design used experimentally supplied action frames, the findings should be read as a controlled test of threatened belonging on cue-guided learning, rather than as a naturalistic simulation of group formation. We argue that both affiliative and instrumental perspectives play a central role in the psychology of social learning.