Watch me, watch you: ritual participation increases in-group displays and out-group monitoring in children.

Collective rituals serve social functions for the groups that perform them, including identifying group members and signalling group commitment. A novel social group paradigm was used in an afterschool programme ( = 60 4-11-year-olds) to test the influence of participating in a ritual task on in-group displays and out-group monitoring over repeated exposures to the group. The results demonstrate that ritual participation increases in-group displays (i.