The Origin of Ritual

Jim Davies, via the Dish:

n 1948 the Polish born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski published a book on a study he conducted of the fishermen of the Trobriand Islands. Sometimes they fished in an inner lagoon, where fishing was pretty predictable. Every time they fished there, they got pretty much the same kind of catch. But they also fished in the open ocean, where the fish were bigger and harder to catch. Sometimes people would get great catches, and other times, terrible ones.  The lure of the very rare great catch proved too tempting for the Trobrianders, so they ventured into the open ocean despite the odds—and developed a set of superstitions. These included rituals performed during fishing and the casting of magic spells.
The circumstance dictated the explosion of rituals. We might think this is a completely human adaptation.  But it turns out that the tendency to resort to ritual in an effort to manage a challenging situation isn’t exclusive to humans. In the same year that Malinowski published his experiment, American psychologist B. F. Skinner found that he could generate superstitious behavior in pigeons. He taught pigeons to press down on a bar in exchange for food. All animals can learn to do this, and this learning process is called reinforcement. But an interesting thing happens if the food is given at random intervals—that is, pressing the bar sometimes does, and sometimes does not, produce a treat, with no discernable pattern. Under these conditions, but not under reliable conditions, the pigeon will start repeating arbitrary, idiosyncratic behaviors before pressing the bar. It might bob its head, or turn around twice. The pigeon becomes superstitious.
It’s as though the pigeon believes, at some level, that there is a reliable way to get a food pellet. It is the pigeon’s experience that pressing on the bar isn’t enough, because that doesn’t always work. So when the food actually comes, the pigeon looks at what it was doing before and wonders if those arbitrary actions—turning the head, making a noise—had something to do with the food delivery. The pigeon tries those things, and sometimes the food does indeed come. But sometimes the pigeon performs the ritual and the food still doesn’t come.
One would think that this would convince the pigeon that getting or not getting the treat has nothing to do with behavior. Similarly, in baseball, the batter can’t point to a direct correlation between tapping their foot on home plate and batting a double. The brave Trobriand fisherman who ventures out into the open sea after practicing a particular ritual can’t rely on the spirits’ goodwill. Voltaire and the philosophers from the Age of Reason would want us to apply rational tools and to understand that there is no connection between cause and effect.
Yet—whether for humans or pigeons—the opposite turns out to be true. There seems to be something in the brain that, when confronted with no easily discernable pattern between one’s action and the outcome, seeks to forge a bridge and create a story that unites the two events—one an action that you can take, and therefore a reliable bet, and two, an event with a low probability of occurrence.

The pigeon shit is fascinating.  One thing I appreciate from being raised in Catholicism is the appreciation of ritual.  I remember the comfort I gained from the familiar rhythms of mass as I was mourning one of my best friends who was killed in a car wreck back when I was 20.  At that time, I gained some appreciation for the value of ritual to deal with the highs and lows of life.  Like the pigeons, we are all comforted by these actions.