When alterations are violations: Moral outrage and punishment in response to (even minor) alterations to rituals.

From Catholics performing the sign of the cross since the 4th century to Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since the 1890s, group rituals (i.e., predefined sequences of symbolic actions) have strikingly consistent features over time.

A sacred commitment: How rituals promote group survival.

Religious groups have survived for thousands of years despite drastic changes in society. One reason for their successful survival is the proliferation of group rituals (i.e.

The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework.

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical work from social psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience.

Rituals decrease the neural response to performance failure.

Rituals are found in all types of performance domains, from high-stakes athletics and military to the daily morning preparations of the working family. Yet despite their ubiquity and widespread importance for humans, we know very little of ritual's causal basis and how (if at all) they facilitate goal-directed performance. Here, in a fully pre-registered pre/post experimental design, we examine a candidate proximal mechanism, the error-related negativity (ERN), in testing the prediction that ritual modulates neural performance-monitoring.

When Novel Rituals Lead to Intergroup Bias: Evidence From Economic Games and Neurophysiology.

Long-established rituals in preexisting cultural groups have been linked to the cultural evolution of group cooperation. We tested the prediction that novel rituals-arbitrary hand and body gestures enacted in a stereotypical and repeated fashion-can inculcate intergroup bias in newly formed groups. In four experiments, participants practiced novel rituals at home for 1 week (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or once in the lab (Experiment 3) and were divided into minimal in-groups and out-groups.

The mere presence of an outgroup member disrupts the brain's feedback-monitoring system.

Much of human learning happens in the social world. A person's social identity-the groups to which they belong, the people with whom they identify-is a powerful cue that can affect our goal-directed behaviors, often implicitly. In the present experiment, we explored the underlying neural mechanisms driving these processes, testing hypotheses derived from social identity theory.

Recognizing religion's dark side: Religious ritual increases antisociality and hinders self-control.

The target article develops an account of religious prosociality that is driven by increases in self-control. We suggest this account is incomplete. Although religion might increase prosociality to the in-group, it decreases it to the much larger out-group.

Emotion down-regulation diminishes cognitive control: a neurophysiological investigation.

Traditional models of cognitive control have explained performance monitoring as a "cold" cognitive process, devoid of emotion. In contrast to this dominant view, a growing body of clinical and experimental research indicates that cognitive control and its neural substrates, in particular the error-related negativity (ERN), are moderated by affective and motivational factors, reflecting the aversive experience of response conflict and errors. To add to this growing line of research, here we use the classic emotion regulation paradigm-a manipulation that promotes the cognitive reappraisal of emotion during task performance-to test the extent to which affective variation in the ERN is subject to emotion reappraisal, and also to explore how emotional regulation of the ERN might influence behavioral performance.