Ritual Behavior, Habits, Human Culture, Religion, Civilization, Marriage, Death, Burning Man & Community | Dimitris Xygalatas | #75

Nick talks to anthropologist Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas, who is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut. His research interests center around human ritual behavior and the interaction between cognition and culture. They discuss his new Book, "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living." Topics covered: Rituals vs. habits; the psychological purpose of ritual; ritualism as an antidote to anxiety; religion and spiritual practices; culture & the birth of civilization; the physiological and psychoactive effects of ritual; Ayahuasca and psychoactive drugs; rituals in sports, gambling, and other human activities; the evolution of language & symbolic cognition; religion, community & Burning Man.

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Dimitris Xygalatas  6:20  Pleasure to be here.Nick Jikomes  6:22  Can you start off by just telling everyone a little bit about who you are? And what kind of background you have?Dimitris Xygalatas  6:27  Yeah, I am an anthropologist, and I'm also a cognitive scientist. I'm one of those rare hybrids. I work at the University of Connecticut, where I'm affiliated with both the anthropology and the psychological sciences department, and I run the experimental anthropology lab.Nick Jikomes  6:45  Yeah, so what, what we're going to talk about today is going to be a lot of ideas and concepts that you explore in your new book called ritual, how seemingly senseless acts make life worth living. I read it in the past week or so. And, you know, I just wanna start by saying, I love the book, I thought it was excellent. I, I've had several guests on who have a new book, or just published a book on. And I usually read parts of those books, this is only the second time that I actually finished the entire book, because it was just so fascinating. One of the things that was fascinating about it was, I mean, you cover a lot of ground. And there's a lot of areas where my understanding of something was pretty much turned on its head, or I started to see things from a brand new vantage point. But you know, as the title suggests, the book is all about ritual. And we're going to explore lots of lots of stuff related to ritualistic behavior, and human cultures. I thought we would just start with some of the basics here to get people grounded. Can you start off by describing the difference between habits and rituals, and what characterizes each of these things?Dimitris Xygalatas  7:52  So obviously, there are a lot of similarities between habits and rituals. Both involve repetition, something that becomes habitual. But if you look at the kinds of things that people consider to be rituals, versus the ones that they consider to be habit habits, you will see that ritual involves a sense of specialness, even sacredness, and then this doesn't have to be in a religious sense. So one way to put it is that habits are one way of taking something useful, and turning into a routine that we can execute mindlessly. Rituals, on the other hand, take something that is that appears to be non utilitarian or useless, and turn this into something special. So a lot of people when I ask them to define ritual, or to give me examples of their daily rituals, sometimes they will say, Oh, brushing my teeth, is a ritual. Now, of course, in the, in the study of ritual, we say that there are as many definitions of ritual, as there are rituals, scholars, so we don't all agree on our definition. But for me, my definition, you know, in my book, brushing your teeth is not a ritual. Why? Well, because it serves an obvious purpose. It is a utilitarian action, that you just turned into something habitual just so that you're able to perform it and as a tool. Now, if you were to wave your tooth person there three times every morning, with the belief that this will cleanse your teeth, or with no belief at all, just because it's part of your tradition now that it would be a ritual and if somebody came into the bathroom while you were doing this cleansing ritual and interrupted, then you're also feel morally upset. That's another thing about our rituals, we feel very personally invested in them. And the studies show that when when our rituals are interrupted when You feel upset, and we find it morally important.Nick Jikomes  10:04  You make this distinction between habits being causally transparent. And rituals being causally opaque what what does that mean?Dimitris Xygalatas  10:14  It means that when I perform a utilitarian action, there's a clear connection between the actions that I'm performing, and the outcome. If I use a knife to slice a loaf of bread, the outcome is very obvious, it's it will, it will allow me to eat the bread. But if I use a ritual, knife to cut a rich a loaf of bread, then you have no way of predicting what I'm going to do with. If I perform a rain dance, my moving about, there's no causal connection to rain falling from the sky. And this is a very important distinction. studies actually saw that we perceive non utilitarian actions differently, we perceive ritualized actions. Intuitively, we see those types of actions as as being socially important. And we see them as being special. So there are studies whether they've shown people the same type of drink. And in one case, there was a sequence of actions performed, which was very utilitarian. So somebody was cleaning the glass, and checking it for any faults and then drinking from it. And in the other condition, the somebody was raising the glass and bowing to it and performing all sorts of other attractions. And when they asked people whether they thought, those two different drinks were really different, I say, No, we're not. But then when they asked them to choose one of them, then people would choose the special drink. And when they asked them to say whether one of them was more special, they will choose the one that had been ritually acted upon. And especially when we told them that these were the types of rituals or the types of actions, or they didn't describe them as rituals found in some remote place like Gabon, when they were even more likely to choose that special drink because you carry the weight of tradition.Nick Jikomes  12:09  So So habits are causally transparent. They're utilitarian, right? When I pick up my toothbrush to brush my teeth, this is a device specifically designed to clean my teeth, I'm performing an action that serves that very concrete function. But when we talk about rituals, there's this causal opacity, as you call it. And an important component of this is symbolism. The The ritual is involving behaviors that symbolize something else. And so what is the importance of symbolism and our ability to think, symbolically when it comes to rituals?Dimitris Xygalatas  12:42  We will people have called us humans are a symbolic species. So symbolism plays a huge role in our lives. And this is one of those one of the reasons why ritual is so tremendously important in our lives. Think for example, funeral rites. If you think from a utilitarian perspective, from a rational perspective, there's no reason why we would even care about taking care of our dead. Well, we just dump them or best bury them without any kind of paraphernalia. But for example, the recent COVID situation, the pandemic showed us how important those which was where when people were prevented from engaging in those symbolic behaviors. They people around the world, they risked their lives, they risked infection, they're receiving funds from the police. In some countries, they even risk receiving beatings and other corporal punishments in order to go there and to perform these symbolic actions towards the people that had lost. And of course, from one perspective, you might think that those death rituals are about the deceased, but they're really not they're really about the living. They allow us to fully express ourselves, they allow us to, to cope with the reality of death. And the way to do that is through these symbolic actions.Nick Jikomes  14:09  So can you just define for everyone, what is a what is a symbol? And how does you know what's special about the mind of a human or the mind of other animals that allows us to think symbolically rather than in other ways,Dimitris Xygalatas  14:23  symbol is something that stands for something else, something that there is not, there's not necessarily an index. So if I see scratch marks on a tree that might tell me that some, some large animal has been there. That's, that's an index that's very clear. There's, again, there's a causal connection between the image I'm seeing and something else that caused it. But a symbol was arbitrary. And by virtue of being arbitrary, that allows us to do all sorts of things. It allows us to, for example, use the symbols as special and unique group markers because then maybe all societies have, let's say, wedding rituals or mortuary rituals, or initiation ceremonies, but our society doesn't this particular way. And there's no reason, no intrinsic reason why it has to be done this particular way. But the fact that this these symbolic ways of doing it allows us to do it in an infinite number of ways. That also means that they allow us to do it in ways that are unique and specific to our own tradition. And that has a lot of weight has a lot of power, and has a lot of implications, while far reaching implications for us human beings and the societies in which way are we live?Nick Jikomes  15:38  Yeah, so So a symbol is something that stands for something else. But more than that, it's different from something like an index. So if I, if I go to the index of your book, everyone knows what an index is, it will tell me specifically this word, or this phrase happens on this page. So there's a very clean arrow that points from one thing to the other. But symbols have they stand for something else, but they have this arbitrary character to them. And I think this ties into things that we'll talk about, you know, when something is symbolic, because of this arbitrariness, you really have to pay attention and focus your mind on the meaning of the symbol in a way that's very different. And I think more demanding than you would for a simple index. And so can you talk about that a little bit more and start to talk about, I think you call it the three R's of ritual behavior, rigid, rigidity, repetition, and redundancy? What are those? And how does this tie into the ability to think symbolically.Dimitris Xygalatas  16:34  So when we're looking at ritual behavior across different domains, and those domains can vary tremendously. So scholars are not the first one to notice this. For scholars for a long time. Of course, separate fields have noticed that there are these very different domains of behavior that have a lot of structural similarities. And those include animal behavior. They include certain conditions like obsessive compulsive behavior, they include individual ritualization. And they include cultural rituals. All of those things have some structure, features in common. And those are things like repetition, rigidity, and redundancy. What does that mean? Ritual actions are repetitive. When Orthodox, Greek, Greek Orthodox Christians passed by a turret, it's customary to cross yourself three times, not once, but three times. That's internal repetition. A lot of rituals, there are some Hindu rituals that involve repeating a mantra hundreds of times 1000s of times, there is also periodic repetition to some rituals, most rituals will be repeated once a week, once a month, once a year, once per generation. Rituals are also rigid, there's a sense that they have to be performed in exactly the same way. So there are these patterns of actions. And those pattern actions must not be altered, even when they are, the general sense is that they're not and that they shouldn't be altered. So that's rigidity. And of course, we have redundancy. And that refers to the fact that even when ritual actions resemble some utilitarian actions, let's say you're performing a purification ritual, so washing my hands, is a is a is a is an act that has a clear, utilitarian purpose, cleaning them, alright. But if I have to wash my hands in the context of a ritual, sometimes I might have to do it for hours, or whatever else I'm performing, they go far beyond the functional requirements of the action.Nick Jikomes  18:51  I see. Yeah. And that immediately, reminds one of, you know, psychiatric conditions that involve, you know, excessive ritualization of behavior. So for example, OCD, someone might wash their hands to the point that they actually cut themselves and wear down their skin, they might, you know, perform something over and over and over again for hours on end to the point where they're actually it's problematic for the rest of their lives. So there seems to be kind of a predisposition for this kind of behavior, perhaps in various other animals, but especially in human beings. Is that your perception?Dimitris Xygalatas  19:25  Indeed, so we see, people are pointed at this connection between OCD and cultural rituals. And we'll get to that, but throughout our lives, from a developmental perspective, we see that I have a two year old and you might actually be hearing some, some of his crying in the background. around this age, you really see that children start to become very ritualized, they have their they have these obsessions with repetition with routine with regularity. They want the exact same thing done the exact same way. If he sees me taking my shoes in a different way, he'll feel just objective, he wants me to do things in the exact same way as they should be done. And we'll see that this reliably, this tendency towards repetition and redundancy and rigidity comes when we're very young, it will often surge in certain times that are related to anxiety, for example, there's the OCD will will surface around the time of pregnancy and early parenthood. And this might have some functional role to play. So typically, when when something when there's a new situation, when there's a new baby, for example, or a new baby's coming, it's a pretty good idea to be obsessive with rules with especially with precautions, that's a pretty good idea to stick to what you know, you don't want to try new foods, you're going to want to try new recipes. This is this is the time of of life, to stick to what you know. And we see that in other stressful situations like warfare, like illness, like sports, ritual, again, tends to surge. So we'll see both in our lifespans of the times the periods in our life that ritual behaviors, certs, but also the kinds of contexts where, where it's really prevalent. And there's a lot of discussion about whether the What the What is really the connection between OCD, and those cultural rituals. So some people have argued that rituals are just one yet another manifestation of, of our, of OCD. So it's just a mental glitch. It's your your hazard precaution system. So your your your need to make sure that everything is neat, and everything is clean, and that you're safe, somehow misfires, and you're not getting the feedback that you actually locked the door. And you go back and check again and again and again. So they see ritual as being a mental glimpse of this sort. Yeah, another perspective says that, Rachel is is actually with us, it's a human universal, because it fulfills deep human needs that go back all the way to the beginning. So to the dawn of our species, and that OCD is simply an exaggerated form of this. So ritualization running wild.Nick Jikomes  22:27  Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely inclined towards the latter view. If you think like an evolutionary biologist about something like this, you notice that, you know, a, from a developmental perspective, children readily learn rituals from others, they also spontaneously come up with their own rituals very early on, in their cognitive development. And to as you just alluded, ritualistic behavior is universal. So all human cultures have ritualistic behaviors of various kinds. And those two things, I think, together really point to some sort of adaptive function there. Because if it was just a mental glitch, natural selection is quite efficient. And glitches aren't allowed to persist for so long across so many different populations. If they're expensive, they will be weeded out by selection. So can you talk a little bit more about this about how we think about the potential adaptive value of ritualistic behavior and the fact that it does seem to be a human universal?Dimitris Xygalatas  23:20  So what do you describe this is exactly my my line of reasoning. It's exactly my perspective, when we see some types of behaviors that are, they're human universals, and they're not anthropologist, debate about human universals all the time. There's rarely any aspect of our lives. That hasn't, that hasn't been challenged as a potentially universal feature. But everybody, I think, would agree that ritual is a true human in ritual. We never, we have never known of any human society, whether past or present, that doesn't have the socialist stipulated repetitive kinds of rituals, the kinds of behaviors that we call rituals. So it's a human universal, it's been for us for as long as we know, we can find in files going back, we can find it in other apes we can find in other mammals. It is omnipresent throughout the animal kingdom. Typically, we don't expect natural selection to allow these things to be as prevalent if they're useless or or harmful. Now, that's just the starting point. Of course, that doesn't, that doesn't prove anything that doesn't show that Rachel is negative, the next step for me, and that's where that's how I started. That's why I got into virtual studies ever since I was a graduate student. This was the the question for me, this was the puzzle. If those things are indeed wasteful, and they're pointless, as they appear to be to an outsider, then why have they persisted for millennia? Then why do we find them in all human societies? And by doing this return research so over two decades sort of doing this type of research, have been able to identify very important functions for those behaviors both at the individual and at the socialNick Jikomes  25:08  level. And so, you know, one of those functions that I think you alluded to a few moments ago is related to, well, it comes up when you think about when you see ritualism. And when you see it expressed most strongly. And as you stated, you know, a new parent war time, you know, whenever there's uncertainty, and the stakes are high, or there's some sort of anxiety provoking situation, you tend to see ritualistic behavior most prominently. And I wonder if there's this connection here, between negative affective states like anxiety that come that are most commonly provoked by uncertain and stressful circumstances, and ritual behavior, I did a recent podcast episode with the neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux. And we were talking about anxiety, and, and consciousness and things. And, you know, he basically said, well, anxiety may be the price that we pay for having such a large prefrontal cortex that allows us to plan for the future and anticipate things and perhaps even think, symbolically. So is there a relationship here between ritualistic behavior and affective states like anxiety that our brains might specifically predispose us to?Dimitris Xygalatas  26:19  Absolutely, I'm glad you brought this up. So in recent decades, neuroscientific use of the brain have changed, we used to think that our brains work, like computers for at least like what computers used to be. So just information processors input in output out. Today, we think that our brains work like some very modern computers, and then there's, This is no accident. That's because we've always tried to build computers based on our current understanding of our own brain. So now, computers are all about prediction. And in our current understanding of the of the brain is also that it's, it's not just a data processing machine. It's a predictive machine. Some people call it the Bayesian brain, that means that our brain constantly tries to make guesses to make informed inferences about the future. And it does that on the basis of contextual information on the basis of prior information. So experience. And this is very important, because from an evolutionary perspective, any kind of computational device device will inevitably evolve towards this predictive capacity. Because unless you have, because computational machine the has the capacity to use prior information to learn from experience, in order to predict what's going to happen, we'll have an edge. So that's how our brain works. This might sound too abstract. So let's, let's turn into something more concrete. So one very specific example was the blind spot and our vision. Many people might not even know this, but because our optical nerve goes through our retina, there's actually a tiny spot in each of our eyes, where we actually don't see anything from the optical from our field of vision that falls onto that spot. And that's something that we don't notice, we have to learn that this is true. And there's a there's an interesting test that you can do to to prove it. But the reason we don't notice it is because our brain fills in the missing information, just like it does when we're looking at the world through a window that has bars, our brain predicts what's missing from the picture in a way that we are singles picture of it. Another way to demonstrate this is to think that and that's one of the examples I've given my my book, let's say you live in San Francisco, and you wake up in the middle of the night because you're better shaking. It's a reasonable inference that there's an earthquake happening. So you run your your instinct is to run out of the house as quickly as possible. But now think that you're living in New York, and there's a there's a train line going by your apartment. So wake up in the middle of the night, and there's some shaking, happening. The first time you might be alarmed, you might run to the hallway, in your underwear just to find yourself embarrassed. But soon you will come to know that this is an earthquake. So your brain will be able to predict to infer what's happening based on prior knowledge. And this how our brain works all the time. It's trying to actively predict what's going to follow we see this from there's evidence from linguistics. Our brain just Finishing Sentences for us fills in the gaps even if they're if they're letters missing in a word and so on, so forth. endless examples. Now, as I mentioned, this is a more efficient cognitive architecture, but it does have some side effects. One obvious side effect is that when but we don't have full predictive capacity. In other words, when there's uncertainty when we don't know what's going to happen next, we experience anxiety. We want to be in control human beings just our brain craves control, it craves information. And when it's lacking information, when it's lacking a sense of control, when it when there's uncertainty, we get stressed. And that's when ritual comes in. So it's a very efficient mental technology. And by extension can be used as a cultural as a social technology in this respect, because what it does is it provides our brain with a sense of control, a sense of regularity, a sense of structure, because if ritual was anything it is structure, we talked about the tweeters, repetitiveness rigidity, you know exactly what's going to happen in a ritual, there's redundancy, you do it over and over and over and over, so becomes very predictable. And that gives her brain a sense of control, that helps us reduce anxiety. And from this perspective, it doesn't matter whether this sense of control is illusory. And one way to put it in the book is that our brain did not evolve to be accuratein processing stimuli that evolved to be efficient. So if this helps us deal with anxiety, then it's something that will become will be adaptive.Nick Jikomes  31:23  Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting idea if, you know, certain animal species, and especially humans, have brains that allow them to think symbolically that allow them to engage in complex social interactions, you know, the network's underlying that are going to be such that, you know, these aren't inherently complicated in uncertain ecological circumstances that such an organism as in, right, if you have to deal with a whole bunch of people in different relationships, it's just inherently uncertain. And if you think about emotional states as information states of the bodies, alright, so anxiety, you know, a lot of people like to think about anxiety is essentially, your brain and body telling you that something is unknown, something is uncertain. And then bias is your behavior to mitigate that, you know, if you don't know what's going on, and things are at a high uncertainty state, you have to pay attention, and you have to sort of bring order and certainty to the situation. And I think what you're saying is, the ritualization of behavior is a very common and universal like, sort of behavioral motif that acts as a kind of buffer to that anxiety, even when it doesn't actually bring, like true information, all certainty to the picture.Dimitris Xygalatas  32:36  Exactly. And one way to put it, is, when we look at the animal world, we might, from my perspective, we might expect that it will be let's just say the dumbest animals that perform so many rituals that are less efficient, less less rational. So you would expect that as as we become more and more intelligent, so animals that have a prefrontal cortex, for example, they would, they would have no need for these pointless actions, they will cut to the chase, they will be perfectly rational. That's not at all what we find if anything is the opposite. We see that smarter animals tend to be more ritualized, not because they can help it but because they can afford it. So they have the mental surplus, to dedicate to those sorts of mental technologies that allow us in a sense to to outsmart ourselves.Nick Jikomes  33:27  Yeah, and one thing that's interesting is, you know, we talked about how one way that rituals are distinct from habits is that they're causally opaque, right? The actions are symbolic. They have this arbitrary character to them, there's, there's no obvious reason why the components of a rain dance should be expected to actually affect the weather. And yet, people tend to believe that rituals are causally efficacious that they actually do something. So can you unpack that a little bit? How do we sort of square that circle with the causal opacity on the one hand, characterizing ritual behavior, but the strong belief that people often have that the rituals actually do cause things to happen in the world?Dimitris Xygalatas  34:06  Yeah, so it's a very interesting phenomenon. If you if you ask people, even those in the context of religious rituals, if you ask people, whether they think the rituals work, you might get a mixed bag. If you're sexual people, they certainly are prone to saying that they don't work. They don't do anything. But in fact, we have done studies in my lab that show that we have intuitions about ritual efficacy. For example, we did a study where we showed people videos of basketball players, so in free throws, and we showed those videos to athletes. We showed them to fans, and we showed them to people who have no clue about basketball so we could barely understand what was going on. So what we did as a result of these videos, each player was shooting a free throw then before the ball. After ball left the player's hands. The video stopped so you couldn't see the outcome of the shot. If you had to predict the outcome of the shot, that was a task. And we had two conditions, in one condition, people could see that the player had done a pre shot ritual, something like spinning the ball or kissing the ball, those are very common among basketball players. And those were the actual, this was real footage from real basketball games, all the shots that we showed them were actually successful, but they didn't know this, they just had to predict the outcome. And in the other condition, they just didn't see this virtualized moment, the camera would switch to another angle. So they didn't see the ritual. And we're finding that when player had performed the price of ritual, the spectators have an expectation that this shot is more likely to be successful. And this effect held for all three of our groups. So for the naive participants, who didn't know much about basketball, for the fans, and even from players themselves. So we seem to have this steep and if if you ask these people, whether they believe that these priests or rituals actually influence the outcome, I'm pretty sure they would say no. But in tour intuitively, we have these expectations and rituals do something. This because it's it's very human to think that doing something is better than doing nothing. When we feel. Again, it's another way of getting a feeling of control. When we're when we feel helpless. When we're in the casino, for example, and we're gambling away, or car or house, then there's nothing that you can do about it, it just the game of dice, or the light, right? The you have zero control, performing these repetitive actions. So that's why we see that casino goers are one of the most superstitious and ritualist groupsNick Jikomes  36:50  do you ever find. I mean, this is this is super interesting, because when you think about the performance of the ritual, and the fact that it has this arbitrary character, so let's take the the free throw shooter in a basketball game as an example. You know, maybe they spin the ball, maybe maybe they you know, dribble the ball two times, or three times something very specific, maybe they do something truly arbitrary. Maybe they adjust their socks every time and then dribble the ball twice, and then spin it. You know, what you're basically saying I think is, on the one hand, this all seems very arbitrary. But when you stop and think about it, actually, from basically a cognitive science or neuroscience perspective, you're trying to actually perform an action with a goal, in this case, to make the free throw, you're always going to be at a stereotype distance from, from, you know, the, the net, everything is standardized. And, you know, when you're talking about motor behavior like this, you want to execute it consistently in order to achieve the goal. And by actually performing a ritual, no matter what the ritual is, in the same way, every same, every time you do this, right before you throw the shot, what you would actually be doing there from a neuroscience perspective is putting your brain and body into the exact same or very similar physiological state. So you're basically giving yourself a constant physiological baseline to work from. And that should actually allow you to become more consistently accurate in your freethrow. And if we extend that further, and we think about something like the rain dance, or some ritual related to gambling, where, you know, you truly have no control over the dice the same way that you have control over the basketball, even though there's no no actual causal connection there from doing that behavior, at the very least, you're mitigating the anxiety that's going to be inherent in the situation. And so it's adaptive In either case, it seems.Dimitris Xygalatas  38:40  Yes. And we also have to think about, about the functional stress when we have this discussion. So stress is a good thing. At least most of the time, or some of them. It evolved to be a good thing. It's a very good thing actually. So it's like paying their actual motivators or behavior. When when something important is about to go down. A little bit of stress will will prepare you for for action. Your body will prepare if it's a fight or flight situation, your mind will prefer you will get this Funnel Vision, this focus. But give some one to one stress and it immediately becomes maladaptive, especially in Wales have to think that there are our physiology evolved in a context that was radically different from the one we currently live in, or modern world is much more stressful. People live in. Many people live far away from their social support networks, their core family and friends. They don't have those ways of mitigating anxiety, anxiety that they would have in the past. The the pace of life is much faster today. Things like social media. Also, exaggerate those stressors. would have been present in, in early societies. So we need more than ever, we need those kinds of ways of mitigating stress. And ritual is one of those types of activities that can provide that. So think of professional sports, for example, that's not something that you would have seen. In early human societies, you would have seen things like warfare, which can be very, very similar. So now we have new new needs new reasons to be stressed. And I think today, more than ever, we rely on ritual and virtualization for coping with situations whether we realize it or not.Nick Jikomes  40:37  Yeah, no, this this inverted U relationship between stress level and performance level is very interesting. For those that don't know, the idea is that, right? You sort of want a medium amount of stress in order to optimize performance. If you're at a very low stress level, or a very high stress level, it's actually going to degrade your performance. You know, anyone who's experienced performance anxiety has experienced their performance go down when they're too stressed out. And when we start to put some of these things together, it's really making a lot of sense to me. So if you imagine the first game of the season, in a basketball season versus the championship game, the championship game is inherently more stressful than as I think you pointed out in the book, you know, when when the stakes are higher in sports, when the game is more meaningful, like in a championship game, you see more frequent and more intense ritual behavior. And it all really seems to fit together, right? If you're in the championship, game, stakes are highest stress level is going to be highest. And you're going to want more intense ritualist ritualistic behavior, because you're going to move yourself from that super high stress, low performance part of the curve to that more medium level part of the curve by by having the ritual actually take down your anxiety levels to that sort of middle middle ground where performance is going to be highest.Dimitris Xygalatas  41:51  Exactly. And another related thing that you'll see, which is also very interesting, very telling, is that studies show that top level athletes, they actually have more rituals, you might expect the opposite to be true. So you might think that the better somebody is, in whatever it is that they do, the less stress there will be or the more they will rely on personal skill and less on superstition, or whatever you want to call it. But in fact, studies show that top athletes have more rituals. Why? Well because they compete for higher stakes. So very famous people like Rafa Nadal, I spent the my book I think, a full page describing his pregame, or the rituals that he performs pre and during the game, which, if somebody only described this behavior outside of any context, you would think that this medical description of somebody suffering from OCD. But it seems to work for him.Nick Jikomes  42:46  Yeah. And so So earlier, we talked about the three R's of ritual behavior, rigidity, repetition and redundancy. You also said something interesting that I want you to unpack for people, you refer to rituals as a kind of social, or cultural technology. So what does that mean for something to be a social technology,Dimitris Xygalatas  43:03  it means that groups of people or societies, they take advantage of those mental capacities or propensity towards virtualization, in order to turn them into tools, and mechanisms that help collective goals. So they help people coordinate their actions, we help them bond with each other, and we help them act as one. So they're more efficient teams.Nick Jikomes  43:32  And, you know, when we think about group ritual behavior, so ritual behavior is a human universal. In general, in the abstract, there's always ritual behaviors in every single culture we look at, but they can be very different from each other. Nonetheless, right? There are some common, more specific forms of ritual behavior, especially around things like marriage and death. So can you can you maybe let's just start with marriage, why is why are marriage rituals so powerful, and so pervasive and common across all human cultures, even though they vary in their details.Dimitris Xygalatas  44:06  So this is a very good observation, you will see if you look at what how the various rituals, then always diversity that we're seeing across cultures and in rituals, how they vary and how they're similar, you will see that they tend to vary in their forms. But they're very similar in terms of the kinds of needs and kinds of problems that they address. So as you mentioned, every society pretty much the way we know has some form of marriage ceremony. Those are very important because they create a sense of fictive kinship, which in turn allows well it's very important for the core family, of course, for establishing pair bonds, and for helping this couple who are presumably going to be raising children together actors as one unit, but they also establish relationships between groups of people. between families. A wedding ritual doesn't bring together only a couple, it also brings together to extended families who now become kin. They have this sense of fictive kinship. And sometimes this can be explicitly said. So when you pronounce somebody's husband and wife or or whatever, you explicitly create this sense of fictive kinship, or a final kinship in this in this case, but by extension, you create those bonds between groups of people. In my home country, fictive kin networks have been very important as they have been, let's say, in parts of Latin America and many other parts of the world. There are a lot of anecdotes in Greece about politicians who used to create these fictive kinship networks, by baptizing 100 hundreds of children. And by that I don't mean that they became priests, certainly, they just attended their baptism. And they were the ones performing the ritual, because that made them grandfathers and grandmothers, or they became best men and best women in a lot of people's weddings, officiating there. And that meant that they had established those kinship ties with all those kinds of families. And by doing that, of course, they undertake certain obligations, which is when I'm in power, I'm going to get your, your kid a job, perhaps. But that also means that they they ensure the loyalty of the of this family, so this family's going to vote for that person from now on and forever, because they have established this fictive kinship relationship. And this is something that in a contemporary context, it might sound funny, but in the course of our of human history that has, that has been one of the main ways of groups of people and extended families of relating to each other, in history is full, full of those examples with how even different countries would change their entire diplomatic relationships based on one wedding of offshore oil offering, or how tribes would come together and manage to avoid bloodshed by by performing a wedding ritual. So they have been played a tremendous role in human history.Nick Jikomes  47:26  Yeah, it would seem that the the capacity, the capacity for symbolism, and to think symbolically, is necessary to actually carry out these forms of ritual and to create these sort of fictive kin networks. You know, again, if we think in evolutionary terms, you know, if we think in strict evolutionary terms, animals will pretty much always devote more resources and expend more effort protecting and cooperating with their genetic kin, literally the people that you're genetically related to. But in humans, especially, we have these large scale societies that were formed, we have these very, sometimes very large, non kin networks. And it seems to be related to what you're just talking about, even though I might not be genetically related to you with the same distance, the same level of closeness as my actual brothers and sisters, and fathers and cousins, I can create a fictive sense of kinship by engaging in rituals. And all of this requires whatever the brain networks are in the human being that allow us to think symbolically. And that really opens up the the adaptive gates, if you will, because now I can cooperate with a much larger number of people, because I'm not strictly limited to those that I'm very closely genetically related to, is that how you maybe start to think about it?Dimitris Xygalatas  48:43  Absolutely. So that's one of the main ways of, of rituals bringing those cohesive effects about is by by promoting what we call phenotypic matching. That means that phenotypes and genotypes they tend to be highly correlated. So two individuals that look very similar to each other, they're more likely to be genetically related the two individuals who look very different. We make those inferences all the time. And we're not the only animal that makes us differences. There are studies for example, showing that parents, especially fathers, they favor children who look more physically like them, compared to those who don't. So originals have a host of ways of host of mechanisms to induce this sense of phenotypic matching in us think about the way people take part in a collective ritual. And when they do, the first thing you see is that those people will tend to look similar because they're all wearing the same clothes or wearing the same masks that were in the same body paint or whatever symbolic insignia they might have. Because they Move in similar ways, so they move in synchrony, or because they go through the same experiences. And sometimes those can be very emotionally arousing experiences. And again, the people in our the course of our lives with whom we go through the most arousing experiences, so the highs and the lows, from the happiest day of your life, to the biggest tragedy you've ever experienced, the people you share those things with, typically are your close family. So by taking a group of people through those experiences, together, rituals, managed to induce this sense in our minds, that we are actually family. And this is why it's an it's not an accident that you'll see in so many ritual traditions. People call each other brothers and sisters.Nick Jikomes  50:47  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, it's also striking that, you know, whether we're talking about marriage rituals, or death rituals, or rites of passage, passage, the rituals seemed to always, not always, but often in most strongly be tied to periods of transition in life, it could be a very clear sort of pure biological transition going from being alive to being dead. It could be a social transition, like going from being single to being married, or it could be a developmental transition, like entering adolescence and becoming reproductively viable. But what they all have in common is they're the these kind of developmental social transition points, which are going to come with a lot of change, and presumably a lot of uncertainty. And they're all highly ritualized. So how do you start to think about the fact that that it's the sort of developmental transition points where we see ritualization, the most does that tie back into what we were talking about previously about uncertainty and change and anxiety mitigation?Dimitris Xygalatas  51:43  Absolutely. So again, so accidental, most human societies have the these sorts of Rites of Passage, as they're called that Mark transitions from one stage to another. So you're, you know, you're no longer a child, you're now an adult, you're no longer single, you're married, you're retired, or you're divorced, you're dead. Transitions tend to be long, stressful and painful. You don't become a child, an adult from one day to another, it's a long process, it involves a lot of uncertainty. It's it's one of the most challenging periods of our life, adolescence, for example, from the hormone level, to the psychological level. So what these rituals do is that they provide a clear demarcation, there's a clear passage, there's, there's a clear moment in time where you go, you walk into this ritual as one type of person, and you walk out as a different type of person. And this is what our policies are called from help, has called rites of passage. And he's he sees those as having three different components, three parts, all kinds of Rites of Passage can be seen as this in the first part, you walk into the ritual, and you said your previous identity, now you see it. And this can be done symbolically in many different ways. You move to a different place, you shave your head, you give up your hair, your clothes, or your name. And then you go into a state that is called the liminal states. And this is the stage where you're, you're between in between. So you're neither a boy, nor a man, or neither, during a wedding ceremony, you're sort of neither single or married. And until a child has been named in some traditions, they're not really considered to be alive. Until the proper funerary rites have been performed, somebody is not considered to be an ancestor, and so on and so forth. So that's the first thing is when you come out of this ritual, you know how a new identity, you might be, often given a new name, you might be given new clothes, you might have a new title, but you're a different person than everybody else knows that, then we'll treat you as a different person, you come out, and now you're a man, now you're a woman. You're an adult, you're a married couple, people are not going to approach you sexually they're supposed to, and everything else that is that is in place.Nick Jikomes  54:14  And so one thing I want you to talk about now is how rituals work in the sense that, you know, I think, you know, we've hinted at it quite a bit. But, you know, to what extent are rituals engineered? To what extent are people sitting down and saying, We need a ritual for something, it needs to serve this kind of purpose, and we're going to come up with some sequence of things that people will do at this particular time, versus how, how much do they evolve organically.Dimitris Xygalatas  54:42  There's clearly a mix of both and from, there's no doubt in my mind, the ritual people tend to attempt to engineer rituals all the time. They do it in contemporary, let's say, corporate team building rituals. And they've done they've done it throughout history. But at the same time, there's a there's a sell So selective pressure, and the rituals that will survive, they're the ones that are there actually make it through that pressure through the process of selection. Every day, there will be 1000s of rituals that are invented throughout the world, very few of them will, will survive. And a lot of the time, you will see that even when they try to engineer a ritual people, the first their first inclination is to define the different ritual that has already worked in some context to refer to a particular tradition. And even when they make something, they make up a new ritual, they will often intentionally try to tie it to tradition to make it look like it's older to make to give it this gravitas that the tradition has. But yeah, for the most part, I think that the ritual that we see around us today, there might be just slight variations of over rituals that have survived for 1000s of years, and have been selected through a process of cultural selection.Nick Jikomes  56:02  Yeah, so I think what you're saying is that, yes, we engineer rituals all the time, we consciously put them together, at least to some extent, and this is quite common. But there's a selection process here. And again, by analogy with biological evolution, right? The way it works is, evolution creates an overabundance of things, there's variation in that abundance, and you don't know what's going to work ahead of time, you just have to use it. And you weed out the things that don't work through a natural selection process, and you retain the things that do work. So I think what you're saying is we engineer new rituals all the time, most of them don't really make the cut, they don't do the thing that we need them to do, they don't have the adaptive value that some rituals do. And so there