The Psychological Foundations of Ritual Learning

Abstract ritual is a universal feature of human culture. A decade of psychological research provides new insight into the early emerging propensity for ritual learning. Children learn the ritual practices and instrumental skills of their communities by observing and imitating trusted group members such as adults and peers. They use social and contextual cues to determine when an action is an instrumental skill versus a ritual, and they modify their behavior accordingly. When behavior is interpreted as a ritual, children imitate with higher fidelity, engage in less innovation, are more accurate when detecting differences, and display more functional fixedness than when behavior is interpreted as instrumental. Children and adults also transmit ritual behavior to others with higher fidelity than they do instrumental behavior. The authors propose that affiliation with social groups motivates imitative fidelity of ritual. Species-specific social learning mechanisms facilitate the transmission of instrumental skills as well as rituals intergenerationally and enable cumulative cultural learning.