Rituals may affect memory in different ways
Connor Wood Do you remember what you were doing when you heard about the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001? How about the details of the pastor’s outfit at your...
View ArticlePainful rituals: good for some, not for others
A new research study from Oxford University shows that rituals associated with different cultural settings have unique effects on group bonding and on memory. This matters for our understanding of...
View ArticleRitual bypasses conscious cognition
Researchers from Denmark and New Zealand claim that ritual allows cultures to transmit knowledge by overloading participants' executive cognitive networks, leaving participants open to suggestions and...
View ArticleCalling an End to the Culture Wars
Connor Wood argues that conservative and liberal thought are both invaluable: conservatives are experts on how to build and maintain small communities, while liberals focus best on big-picture and...
View ArticleRitual creates tribes…and tribalism
In a lot of ways religion is a Catch-22. It primes us to be strongly bonded to the people around us, which is one of the single biggest predictors of personal happiness, health, and life satisfaction....
View ArticleRitual reduces life’s noise-to-signal ratio
Our world is filled with unspoken social conventions that transform messy, continuous information into clearer, binary data. Ritual is one of them. Anthropologist Roy Rappaport claimed that ritual, the...
View ArticleTrust issues? The answer might be rhythm
Why do religions have rituals like bowing or praying in time with a group? Recent research from New Zealand shows that moving or chanting in sync helps people act more generously – especially if...
View ArticleReligion, imagination, and secret worlds
Why do religions seem to create such strong communities? Partly, it's because they help people to share secret, imaginative worlds with one another – just like children playing. Does this mean...
View ArticleDoes atheism arise from wealth?
is atheism a luxury of the wealthy? Yes. But this isn't simply because the wealthy don’t need the comforts of a posited afterlife. It’s also because materially comfortable people have more energy to...
View ArticleHolden Caulfield and the Super Bowl
Is the Super Bowl stupid? Sure. But let's stop the Holden Caulfield Syndrome of mocking it to show we're superior. Because athletics is ritual and subjunctive play, and all rituals – all social...
View ArticleDon’t understand religion? Experiment with it.
As William James reminded his readers a century ago, our internal mental states and attitudes don’t arise independently of our actions. If you want to make peace with the oddity of other people's...
View ArticleAwesome theories of religion, Part 2
This week, I’m focusing on four thinkers who have advanced our understanding of how ritual and beliefs intertwine, and how religion both creates and destroys metaphorical boundaries or "walls" in human...
View ArticleAmerica’s public ritual gone terribly wrong
Sports exemplify the central role of play in human culture, the crucial importance of arbitrary rules and ritual. But the hyper-commercialized ritual of the Super Bowl is becoming increasingly disturbing.
View ArticleOverworked? Try a little ritual
Human ritual is an evolutionary product of the behavioral instinct for play. Without that instinct, we might work ourselves to the bone.
View ArticleSocial media is toxic. Religious studies tells us why.
Why does social media bring out the worst in us? Religious studies tells us that ritual helps stabilizes society – and there's no ritual on the internet.
View ArticleWant to study the science of religion? Start with this MOOC
A science of religion would help us understand some baffling things. Why do otherwise normal people spend thousands of dollars to flock from halfway around the world to Mecca? What’s with all the...
View ArticleIs a global community really possible?
This was supposed to be an era of globalism and tolerance. But if we want the global community to seem real, we have to use ritual and myth to make it real.
View ArticleRituals boost self-control
Maybe you’ve heard of the “marshmallow experiment” for testing people’s self-control. In this classic psychology study, scientists offered young children a choice: either eat a single marshmallow...
View ArticleHow Religion Is Like Play
Is religion a form of play? I asked this question in a recent article in Orbiter, a new online magazine that tackles the relationship between science and meaning. Taking an evolutionary biological...
View ArticleElitism Is a Problem. Being Elite Is the Solution.
It’s almost 2018. We survived the past year, but it was a stormy one. Global politics are more unstable than at any time since the height of the Cold War, and maybe before that. Populist leaders are...
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