The cultural evolutionary trade-off of ritualistic synchrony

Author:

Gelfand Michele J.1ORCID,Caluori Nava2ORCID,Jackson Joshua Conrad3ORCID,Taylor Morgan K.4

Affiliation:

1. Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, 1147 Biology-Psychology Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA

2. Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA

3. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA

4. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA

Abstract

From Australia to the Arctic, human groups engage in synchronous behaviour during communal rituals. Because ritualistic synchrony is widespread, many argue that it is functional for human groups, encouraging large-scale cooperation and group cohesion. Here, we offer a more nuanced perspective on synchrony's function. We review research on synchrony's prosocial effects, but also discuss synchrony's antisocial effects such as encouraging group conflict, decreasing group creativity and increasing harmful obedience. We further argue that a tightness–looseness (TL) framework helps to explain this trade-off and generates new predictions for how ritualistic synchrony should evolve over time, where it should be most prevalent, and how it should affect group well-being. We close by arguing that synthesizing the literature on TL with the literature on synchrony has promise for understanding synchrony's role in a broader cultural evolutionary framework. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.

Publisher

The Royal Society

Subject

General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Reference101 articles.

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