Article archive / January 2022
Originally published: . Volume 13, No. 1. Source pages: 16.
Dr. Matthew Rosanna‘s newest book is a beautifully elegant and concise text connecting the complex issues of psychological ritual, group behavior, and evolutionary psychology. In it he continues his lifelong exploration of the beauty and complexity of ritual, including the scientific underpinnings. He willingly admits his joy and passion of the subject and writes, “All life is gesture. Ritual is gesture, perfected. A rich life is one filled with ritual.“
Rosanna maintains that we are an intensely social species and often our happiness hinges on the quality of our relationships which often are maintained through the interconnectedness of ritual.
Rosanna argues that rituals are created as mechanisms for resource management. He bases his argument on several claims including that evolution and fitness became contingent on psychological states and that these states became resources. He explores how ritual actually manages the psychological resources, cultivating them and directing them.
He bases much of his work on the notion that humans are hyper-social animals. "We cooperate with one another in ways that far exceed that of any other species," Rossanna writes, and puts forth evidence that we have a evolved to inter- dependency where survival depends on working with others. “You either figured out how to work with others, are you starved.“
Then there was group competition. Over time the forging groups developed a competitive design with each other for limited resources. This laid the foundation for what Rosanna calls psychological states––a state of mind, including thoughts and feelings, and which causes certain behaviors. “Ultimately, psychological states reduce to particular patterns of brain activity," he notes. Dr. Rosanna explains how these psychological states become resources in and of themselves and have prosocial implications. Ritual manages these resources.
He supports his views saying that more than a decade of research has shown that ritual activity increases levels of prosocial psychological states including those states such as “goodwill, empathy, trust, liking, perceived unity and similarities.“ He also notes that ritual participation is associated with greater generosity and group conformity.
He explains ritual and contrasts it with routine, ritualized behavior, and useless rituals. Rosanna points out that a central theme of this work is that rituals do accomplish an important psychological goal and manage important psychological resources. However, he writes “This idea is at odds with prevailing scholarly views on ritual."
Throughout the chapters he reviews empirical work showing how rituals create and nurture prosocial psychological resources. He explains how ritual and cooperation work, how ritual and social bonding occur, and how ritual and belief resonate together. He also tackles the concept of ritual and trust and human groups, and explains how ritual replenish his psychological resources and promote social capital and nurturance between group participants.
He warns that the constructive results of rituals are not a given, And that “…the ends resulting from ritual cohesion are not necessarily constructive or moral in any universal sense.”
Rosanna has captured and delineated ritual types and the work they do in the community of humans. He includes communal recommitment, individual recommitment, tension management, sacrifice offering or atonement, traditional communal transitions, communal transitions, personal transitions, and personal transition initiation. He explains how each of these solve a varying problem in the group, provide a resource and do “Ritual work.“
Dr. Matt Rossano, has served as Professor and past Chair of the Department of Psychology at Southeastern Louisiana University.
He has served as ad hoc reviewer for over twenty journals including Perception, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Review of General Psychology, Topics in Cognitive Psychology, Current Anthropology, and British J. of Social Psychology. And he has served as ad hoc reviewer for Brook/Cole Publishing, Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, Elsevier Press, Columbia University Press, Oxford Press, and National Science Foundation.
Dr. Rossano, expert in evolutionary psychology, has also authored A Dialogue about the Mind, the Soul, and What It Means to Be Human; Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved; Evolutionary Psychology: The Science of Human Behavior and Evolution; as well as book chapters in The Nature of God: Evolution and Religion, Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution, The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behaviour, and New Developments in Consciousness Research.
Rossano’s article, “The essential role of ritual in the transmission and reinforcement of social norms,” published in Psychological Bulletin in 2012, has been often cited. He writes that ritual and ritualized behavior is essential to the transmission and reinforcement of social norms, and that these norms are morally significant for cooperation and social organization.
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