What Is the Role of Ritual in Binding Communities Together?

It has long been recognized that participation in collective rituals strengthens group cohesion. In recent decades, researchers have begun to disambiguate the psychological mechanisms involved, including social synchrony, causal opacity, shared memory, and the transmission of group-identity markers. The focus here is on the ways in which the performance frequency and emotional intensity of collective rituals influence the way these mechanisms operate and what the downstream behavioral consequences of this are. Much of the research on this topic has been conducted within the conceptual framework provided by the theory of the modes of religiosity, which distinguishes two main kinds of collective rituals: high frequency and low arousal (doctrinal) and low frequency and high arousal (imagistic). We expand this framework to also incorporate theories about the role of fusion, identification, normative tightness-looseness, relational mobility, supernatural moral enforcement, and credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) in motivating prosocial action.