What is Ritual Behavior?

Ritual behavior, intuitively identifiable by its conservatism, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a wide variety of life situations, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in the complex routine of many children; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults, especially birth around certain stages of the life-cycle. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualistic behavior in the context of an evolved precautionary system designed to detect and respond to perceived threats to fitness. This system, unlike fear-systems designed to respond to an overt threat, includes a repertoire of potential threat signals as well as species-specific precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not provide negative feedback for assessment of potential hazards, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions and repeatability of action. Furthermore, anxiety levels tend to focus on the low-level gesture units of behavior, not the goal-related higher-level units commonly used in parsing action-flows. Usually automatic actions are submitted to cognitive control. This "swamps" working memory, the effect of which is temporary relief from intrusions, but also their long-term strengthening. General activation of this precautionary system explains intrusive and ritualistic behavior in normal adults. The gradual calibration of the system occurs through the rituals of childhood. Cultural imitation of the general inputs of this system makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. Many empirical predictions come from this synthetic model.



Ritualistic behavior
Ritualistic behavior

Domains Ritual Behavior

The term ritual refers to a broad and diverse field of human behavior. At one end of an ideological continuum, a ritual is a public, elaborate, and often large-scale religious, aesthetic or civil ceremony. On the other end, it can be one of a variety of private and personal rituals, such as those associated with religious prayer or one's own aesthetic behavior. Between these ideological poles are many small group and family rituals; for example, formal office lunches, and birthday and holiday celebrations. The interpretation, definition, and even identification of ritual behavior varies widely across disciplines, due to the variety of phenomena, and the different theoretical approaches employed. Despite these differences, "rituals" can generally be described as formal behavioral systems consisting of four elements

  • Actor-participant
  • An audience
  • Scripted episodic behavior
  • Ritual artifacts.

Features of Rituals Behavior

  1. First, rituals are distinguished by a specific set of physical Characteristics relating to the specific aspects of individual actions that compose them, which are structured in rigid, formal and repetitive ways. Unlike other behaviors, rituals are usually broken down into units of fragmented actions, which are then sequenced, patterned, and repeated in fixed or bounded ways, unlike habits or routines, which can change each time they are performed. Because of this immutability, rituals generally require "sincere adherence" to the rules, making it imperative to follow the script properly.
  2. Second, the irreversibility of its performance is also associated with to some of the psychological elements that come with the performance Ritual, usually enhances its meaning.
  3. The Final Element of the Ritual Serves as a Connecting Piece between physical and psychological characteristics about (a) fragmentary, rigid, formal and repetitive verbs (physical); and (b) symbolic values (psychological), rituals also tend to deprecate the target.



Ritualistic behavior
Ritualistic behavior

 

Who created the concept of ritualistic behavior in psychology? 

Scientific interest in rituals is nothing new. However, our focus on the regulatory functions and underlying psychological and cognitive processing of rituals are now experimentally tested both in the laboratory and field, social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, through the use of techniques common to behavior Economics, and experimental anthropology. This has created a renewed interest in the subject and a variety of

Novel Question & Testable hypotheses that have heretofore gone unexplored. Combination provides a psychological explaining rituals, how they are performed, providing insight into their various behaviors and impressive results, and

Why do they appear the way they look? Further, we have examined the underlying evidence of the two proposals received from

Cybernetic control model suggests that rituals control

(a) Emotions

(b) Performance target states

(c) Social relations to others because

1. Each of these states lack Increase ritualistic behavior.

2. Enforce ritualistic can reduce these losses. Improve our regulatory account an understanding of the underlying cognitive processing responsible for driving various psychosocial outcomes Religious rites.