Exploring ritualized actions outside a natural context

Description

As part of a recently started project, Ritual Act, under the Religion, Cognition and Culture research unit (Aarhus University, Denmark),  two  simple behavioral studies were conducted that investigated if certain aspects of ritualization give rise to changes in how subjects spontaneously segment observed actions. It is a long standing presumption in anthropology and the scientific study of religions, as well as behavioral biology, that ritual and ritualization differ from ordinary actions by formal features such as causal under-determination, intentional under-specification, and by perceptual features such as iteration, redundancy, and extreme scriptedness. It is further assumed that this has particular effects on human cognitive processing. In order to empirically investigate these claims, we have conducted two studies addressing a basic feature of human action perception. The studies show that scriptedness, redundancy, and especially alteration of the causal relations between parts of the event affect the action segmentation process, and we speculate that this has important consequences for how actions are understood, and how they are related to other actions.