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The ritual form hypothesis General questions How do cognitive capacities involved in representing action inform judgements of the efficacy of religious rituals? Why are some religious rituals repeated frequently, while others are performed rarely or only once? Why are the effects of some religious rituals considered to be permanent, unless ritually reversed, while the effects of others are considered to wear off naturally? Theory (Summarized from Justin Barretts Bringing data to mind: empirical claims of Lawson and McCauleys theory of religious ritual [1]). Lawson & McCauley [2, 3] circumscribe religious rituals as acts in which (1) someone (2) does something (3) to someone or something (4) in order to bring about some non-natural consequence (5) by virtue of appeal to superhuman agency. The primary conceptual tool participants and observers use to process religious rituals is an action representation system a conceptual system or device posited to operate in reasoning about any action, religious or not. The action representation system drives explanations and predictions about the ritual action on the basis of identifying the actor, the action, and the object (or patient). Once these slots are filled, the device starts generating inferences, e.g. about the intentions of the actor, the goal of the action, and the probable consequences of the action. Religious rituals are therefore understood as social acts, and as such harness social cognitive mechanisms for the generation of predictions and interpretations of the action. The action representation system and universally occurring social cognitive mechanisms shape how rituals are conceptualized and performed. They generate predictable, converging intuitions about the probable efficacy of rituals, even among people who have no little or no information about the religious system of which the ritual is a part. Specific Predictions Primacy of Agency Hypothesis The authors predict that observers and performers of rituals will intuitively judge that for a ritual to be efficacious, the ritual must be conducted by a qualified intentional agent. They will regard performance of the correct action to be of lesser importance than having the proper performer. Right Intentions Hypothesis If social cognition undergirds ritual intuitions, then even ritually nave observers should rate having the correct intentions as more important than a particular action, provided that the other person in the social exchange is aware of the good intentions. It is important to note that if a ritual appeals to a god who does not have access to the ritual agents intentions, correct actions may matter more than correct intentions. A less-than-omniscient god may have to read intentions via actions, just as humans do.

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Repeatability Hypothesis The Principle of Superhuman Agency (PSA) Because religious ritual actions do not have standard causal relations between the action and intended outcomes, the action representation system pays particular attention to additional agency injected at one of the three slots in the action structure. L&M observe that in religious rituals, gods (or culturally postulated superhuman agents) occupy the agent slot, as when a god or specially empowered person does the acting; the patient slot, as when a god or specially empowered person or object receives the action; or the instrument slot, as when a specially empowered instrument is used in the action. The action representation system treats actions in which superhuman agency is in the agency slot as having special properties. Special agent rituals, in which a god (or representative of a god) acts, are intuitively regarded as having more permanence than when an ordinary human performs an act. Special agent rituals are thus not repeatable for the particular combination of agents, patients and outcomes involved. Special patient and special instrument rituals, however, may be repeated. Potential Reversability Hypothesis Only special agent rituals may potentially be ritually reversed because the effects of special patient and special instrument rituals are not represented as permanent there is no necessity for them to be ritually reversed. They wear off naturally, so to speak. Sensory Pageantry Hypothesis Special agent rituals will have more sensory pageantry relative to other rituals within the same system. The arousal of emotional responses help convince participants that something profound and superpermanent has transpired. System Centrality Hypothesis In religious rituals, the connection to superhuman agency is not always immediate, i.e. it is not always associated with any of the three slots (agent, patient/object, or instrument) of the surfacelevel action representation. It may be represented in some previously performed ritual, however, and these previous rituals may impact the surface level. So, for example, when a priest occupies the action slot in a special agent ritual, such as ordination or a new priest, the superhuman agent is not immediate but deeply embedded in the rituals action structure. The priest is the appropriate agent for the action due to a long series of such ordination rituals that may be traced back to the first direct ordination by a superhuman agent. The authors predict that the fewer enabling rituals that must be appealed to in order to implicate a superhuman agent (i.e., the more immediately represented the superhuman agent is), the more fundamental or central the ritual is to the religious system. Evidence Barrett & Lawson [4] found that in descriptions of fictitious rituals, participants judged having the right kind of agent as more important than doing exactly the right kind of action, but only in those rituals that appealed to superhuman agency. When superhuman agency was not implicated

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in the action structure, the agent was no longer considered important for the success of the ritual (see also [5]). Barrett [6] further asked whether intentions mattered more than actions in judgements of ritual efficacy and whether judgements changed if the god in question had to read intentions through the actions (Dumb god) as opposed to being able to read minds directly (Smart god). Participants judged that when the god could know intentions, intentions were more important for ritual efficacy than the particular action. Intentions were important in both conditions, but in the Dumb god condition, participants judged performing a different action as significantly more damaging to the success of the ritual. Malley & Barrett [7] obtained data from Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish informants that supports the repeatability, potential reversibility, and sensory pageantry hypotheses, with regard to a range of special agent, patient and instrument rituals. Outstanding issues Cross-cultural data are needed to disambiguate whether the results already gathered with respect to the primacy of agency and right intentions hypotheses is representative of the particular, agent-centred sort of social cognition of American adults. Systematic documentation concerning ritual observers and participants explanation for why actual rituals in real-world ritual systems succeed or fail. Cross-cultural survey data of participants judgements about rituals repeatability and reversibility, as well as data on actual ritual practices with regard to these aspects. Measurements of comparative levels of sensory pageantry and emotional arousal in special agent, patient, and instrument rituals. Behavioural measures relevant to the centrality hypothesis, such as whether participants more consistently practice central rituals (but vary on peripheral ones); whether variation in practice of central rituals would be a mark of schism; and whether procedural variation in the performance of central rituals is less common than in peripheral rituals.

See also Modes of religiosity

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References 1. Barrett, J.L., Bringing data to mind: empirical claims of Lawson and McCauley's theory of religious ritual, in Religion as a human capacity: a festschrift in honor of E. Thomas Lawson, T. Light and B.C. Wilson, Editors. 2004, Brill: Leiden. Lawson, E.T. and R.N. McCauley, Rethinking religion: connecting cognition and culture. 1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCauley, R.N. and E.T. Lawson, Bringing ritual to mind: psychological foundations of cultural forms. 2002, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrett, J.L. and E.T. Lawson, Ritual intuitions: congnitive contributions to judgments and ritual efficacy. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2001. 1(2): p. 183-201. Srensen, J., P. Lienard, and C. Feeny, Agent and instrument in judgements of ritual efficacy. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2006. 6(3-4): p. 463-482. Barrett, J.L., Smart gods, dumb gods, and the role of social cognition in structuring ritual intuitions. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2002. 2(3): p. 183-193. Malley, B. and J.L. Barrett, Can ritual form be predicted from religious belief? A test of the Lawson-McCauley hypothesis. Journal of Ritual Studies, 2003. 17(2): p. 1-14.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

For a critical analysis of the competing hypotheses of Lawson & McCauley and Whitehouse see McCauley, R.N. 2001. Ritual, memory, and emotion: comparing two cognitive hypotheses (in Religion in mind: cognitive perspectives on religious belief, ritual, and experience, Ed. J. Andresen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), and chapter 8 of Whitehouse, H., 2004. Modes of religiosity: a cognitive theory of religious transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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