Ritually Shaping the Imagination: Humanity in Four Acts

Act 1: Imagination is AdaptiveAct 2: Supernatural Imagination is ChildishAct 3: Ritual molds childish supernatural imagination into

adult religious beliefAct 4: Ritual inherits the earth

Act 1: Imagination is adaptive

Imagination: the ability to create situational models unconstrained by the realities of the immediate present;

alternative situational models

Supernatural Imagination

• Supernatural agents with supra-human powers exist (omniscience, magical causation, moral concern)

• Promiscuous teleology: universe and life are purposeful; powers control our destiny

• Imminent justice: ultimately good is rewarded, bad is punished

• Essentialist thinking: Human “essence” that transcends materiality “soul.”

Adaptive Value of Imagination

• Mental simulation: suffering negative consequences mentally rather than physically

Adaptive value of imagination

• Envisioning unseen mediating forces: enhanced understanding of natural causation

• Wind blows – apple falls from tree. Mediating force: branch shaking. Wind blows –branch shakes – apple falls.

• Branch shaking could be accomplished in alternative way (climb tree shake branch).

Adaptive value of imagination

• Envisioning unseen mediating forces: enhanced understanding of natural causation

Some mediating forces are not readily visible. Pull rake – retrieve fruit. Pull rake – stiff blade – retrieve fruit. Pull rake – flexible blade – no retrieve fruit

Adaptive value of imagination

• Envisioning unseen mediating forces: envisioning other minds

Unseen mediating causal forces

• Chimps pass some TOM tests, but fail physical mediating forces tests• Tomasello (1999): unseen mental state attribution precedes unseen physical causal

attribution• Richert & Smith (2010): unseen mental state attribution – unseen mental states of

unseen agents – unseen physical causal attribution.

Adaptive value of imagination

Imagination and social competence: More imaginative kids are more socially competent kidsKids with imaginary friends (65% of 7-year-olds cross-culturally)

-- less shy, -- more sociable, -- more emotionally expressive, and tend -- score higher on theory of mind measures compared to children without imaginary companions

Also: lack of pretense indicator of autism

More pretend play has been linked to: -- better performance on TOM tests-- better grasp of how others’ thoughts, emotions, desires, and beliefs vary based on situational factors. -- Higher likeability and sociability ratings from peers and teachers.

Adaptive Value of Imagination

• Imagination in Adults: Adults who regularly read fictional literature score higher on measures of empathy, reading emotions from facial expressions, and other measures of social acumen. Interestingly, reading copious amounts of non-fiction was a negative predictor of social skill

Adaptive value of imagination

• Hyper-active agency detection device (HADD): Assuming agency based on minimal evidence. Avoiding the high cost of missing an agent

• Maybe necessary for supernatural imagination, but woefully insufficient. • No religion among non-humans• No reason for supernatural agents to be omniscient, morally concerned, immortal, etc.• Why soul? Why purpose?

Act 2: Supernatural Imagination is childish or: The Ontogenetic origins of supernatural imagination

Omniscient Supernatural agents (God): Young children (3-4) over estimate knowledge of others. By 5-6 years, children are appreciating limits of other’s (human’s) knowledge, but continue to attribute super-knowledge to God (Barrett & Richert’s “preparedness” hypothesis).

Magical Causation

• Magic: the cause of unexplainable things.

• Invoked when: (1) the event was a clear violation of ordinary rules of causality, and (2) no other physical explanation was available to account for the event

Magical Causation

• Bering & Parker, 2006: 3-7 year olds: Princess Alice will help you find the ball

• Flickering lights, falling picture• 3 = physical causes• 5 = Princes Alice, but no meaning• 7 = Princes Alice, wrong box• It may be that it is only when one

understands a physical law (thoughts and desires cannot affect physical objects) that one is in a position to imagine the significance of that law’s potential violation (a message from supernatural agent).

• Knowledge of physical causation may reduce total number of events that are “unexplained.” But it may also increase appeals to supernatural for those events that remain.

Developmental Increase in Supernatural Causation

• When given difficult to explain scenarios (e.g. spontaneous remission of cancer), appeals to supernatural causation increase with age (Woolley et al, 2011).

Imminent Justice

•Piaget (1932naturally connect “the fault that has been committed and the physical phenomenon that serves as punishment.” Furthermore, these punishments are assumed to be “automatic” and emanating “from the things themselves” (p. 251).

•Why did the bridge collapse? Child on it stole apples earlier.

Imminent Justice

• Fills conceptual niche, like magical thinking.

• Use when: motives and outcomes matched (i.e. a person with a bad motive was “punished” or a person with a good motive was “rewarded”) and

• when the cause of the outcome was ambiguous or hard to explain.

• No physical explanation? Build a moral one

Promiscuous Teleology

• Jean Piaget (1929) described animistic and anthropomorphic thinking

• Why does the wind blow? “So I can fly my kite.”• Why does the tree “eat” my kite? “Because it hates me.”

Promiscuous Teleology

•Creationists are born and (sometimes) unmade•seven- and eight-year-olds prefer teleological explanations for natural objects/events.

•five to ten year old children from both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist households preferred God as the reason for the emergence of different animal species.

•Infants expect agents to create order, natural forces create disorder

Essentialism

• Gelman(2004 p.404), "Essentialism is the view that certain categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly but that gives and object its identity“

• Looks like a zebra, acts like a zebra, but it’s still a horse!

• Soul beliefs: the immaterial human essence

Entr’acte: The “prepared” religious mind

• Human minds are imaginative because imagination is adaptive• Childhood imagination includes following assumptions:

– Unseen agents abound– Agents have supra-human powers– Magical causation explains unexplainable, highly improbably events– The world is purposeful and just – Immortal soul

Act 3: Ritually molding childish supernatural imagination into adult religious belief

Or: Ritually outlining the “serious” supernatural

• Rituals signal group norms, including normative supernatural beliefs and emotionally bond children to them.

• Ritual outlines the serious supernatural (the cross, the soul) vs. the non-serious (flying sleighs, leprechauns, etc.)

• Ritual cost gives serious supernatural beliefs credibility; non-utilitarian behaviors are interpreted morally not mundanely.

Baby rituals

• Ontogenetic origins: Mother-infant ritualized interactions

• Repetitive, Attention-getting; rule-governed; formalized, emotionally engaging.

Ritually outlining the “serious” supernatural

• Ritual actions: repetitive, intentional, rule-governed, non-utilitarian (“useless”).

• Repetitive, intentional, “useless” acts trigger a moral interpretation

Ritual Cost = Credibility

“Useless” acts the extract an obvious cost put credibility to underlying beliefs

Ritual and over-imitation

• Children more likely to imitate intentional, repeated, non-instrumental gestures (i.e. ritualized gestures).

• Distinguish ritualized gestures from causally inefficient gestures and drop out latter less often then former when helping another achieve and instrumental goal

• Ages 3-6, younger kids see all adults as god-like; older kids just making transition to understanding limits of human mind

Over-imitation and norms

• By 3, kids are enforcing group norms on 3rd parties• By 4, kids connect ritualized actions with normative standards and

protest third-party “over-imitative” failure, especially if they have over-imitated

• Thus, encode normative rule from ritualized action (“it ought to be done this way.”)

• 60% of kids protested omission of arbitrary, causally-irrelevant behaviors, sometimes even after instrumental goal was achieved.

Over-imitation and group anxiety

Kids more likely to faithfully imitate when primed with ostracism

Sensitive period for ritual shaping?

• “Everyone has god-like powers”: 3-year-olds• “Humans are limited, but God has super-powers”: 5-year-olds• Norm enforcement and over-imitation present by 4 years• Only by age 7 can ritual actions be changed if intentions are good

Explicit, normative, credible belief planted in fertile, emotionally-invested, naturally-accepting, soil

Act 4: Ritual Inherits the Earth

• Cro-Magnon Neanderthal• Cognitive differences?

Act 4: Ritual Inherits the Earth

• The ritual cost difference between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals• Both Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens gathered and fashioned

beads

Homo sapiensKsar’ Akil (Levant) 814Ucagizli (Turkey) 1098Fumane (Italy) 900

NeanderthalsFumane (Italy) 1Quincay (France) 6Grotte du Renne (Fr) 36

Ritual cost

• Burials: • Sungir (Hss)• Chapelle-aux-Saints

Cave rituals

• Upper Paleolithic Cave Ventures

Cave rituals

Bruniquel Cave “bear cult” rituals, Neanderthals

Rhino Cave, Botswana, Hss

Ritual: Robbing nature of the last word

Larger than Life