Repetitious magic rituals are thought to be more effective

Magical rituals - routines designed to bring about a real-world effect, like curing disease or cursing a rival - have been part of human society since as far back as anyone can tell. So, as a species, we've had plenty of time to sort out what works and what doesn't.

But the question is, do people have a gut feeling for what makes a good ritual? To find out, Cristine Legare (University of Texas at Austin) headed to the city of Belo Horizonte, located in the south-eastern region of Brazil. Brazilian culture is suffused with all sorts of magical rituals - they call them simpatias. Here's an example:

“Buy a new sharp knife and stick it four times into a banana tree on June 12th at midnight (i.e., Valentine’s day in Brazil, Saint Anthony’s day is on the 13th). Catch the liquid that will drip from the plant’s wound on a crisp, white paper that has been folded in two. The dripping liquid captured on the paper at night will form the first letter of the name of your future partner”

Working with a colleague, she created a large number of variations of real simpatia. Each was modified so as to accentuate one of nine different characteristics:

1. specificity of time
2. specificity of place
3. specificity of material
4. repetition of procedures
5. number of procedural steps
6. number of items used
7. edibility (presence or absence of edible items)
8. digestibility (presence or absence of any sort of ingestion)
9. religious icon (presence or absence of a religious icon).

Then she asked the locals which of these rituals was the most effective. It turned out that varying most of these characteristics had no effect on the perceived efficacy of  the rituals.

However, she find that simpatia that insist on a specific time, or that have more individual steps and more repetitions of those steps, or that specify the involvement of a supernatural agent, were thought to be more effective.

But perhaps this is just about simpatias in that cultural context, and not about magical rituals in general?

So Legare tested these same simpatias on US college students, and found pretty similar results. At least, all the trends were the same, although statistically it wasn't as robust because the US students were less likely to think that any of the rituals would have any effect. College education does pay off after all!

Legare thinks that the the problem with magical rituals is that it's very hard to know whether or not they work. So, in the absence of evidence, we tend to go for ones that intuitively seem more likely to work. And that means ones with more steps and more repetitions.

After all, if doing something once has some effect, then repeating it has to have a greater effect - and so we prefer rituals that hyper-activate our instinctive understanding of cause and effect.

And appealing to a supernatural being has surely got to help, too!

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Legare CH, & Souza AL (2012). Evaluating ritual efficacy: Evidence from the supernatural. Cognition, 124 (1), 1-15 PMID: 22520061

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

For less-religious Americans, compassion is a significant factor in prosocial behaviour

Apologies if you saw this one when it came out last month, but it's an interesting study that really deserves a closer look!

Laura Saslow (University of California at San Francisco) and colleagues wanted to know whether compassion influenced the prosocial tendencies (altruism, generosity, trust etc) of the religious and non religious. So they ran three different studies - different groups of people, and different tests.

In the first, they found that across the USA (looking at data from the 2004 General Survey), religious people were slightly more likely to say that they did prosocial things like giving food or money to a homeless person, returning money after getting too much change, allowing a stranger to go ahead in line, volunteering time for a charity, etc. They were also more likely to say that they were compassionate (for example, that they often have tender, concerned feelings for less fortunate people, or that when they see someone being taken advantage of, they feel kind of protective towards them).

Now, that's not too surprising - it's been known for a long time that religious people report being more prosocial (although whether they are is another matter!). However the interesting finding is that the difference between compassionate and non-compassionate people was much bigger for the less religious than for the more religious.

In a second study, they asked American adults to watch one of two videos. The first was about child poverty, the second was just a clip of two guys talking. Then they were asked various apparently non-related things - like how much salary should be spent on charity, or how much they would donate in the Dictator Game.

Once again, the more religious participants said that they were somewhat more prosocial, but they were not not affected by the video. The result was that less religious who had watched the video reported being more prosocial than the more religious (regardless of whether they had watched the video).

In the final study, they brought a group of students to the lab and asked them how compassionate they were feeling right now. Then they got them to go through a battery of games designed to test prosocial behaviour - basically these are all variants of the "Prisoners Dilemma", in which the subjects have to give money, or bet money in the hope that their anonymous co-players will reciprocate.

As you can see in the graphic, for the less religious Americans prosociality was much higher in those who said they were feeling compassionate. For the more religious Americans, prosociality was pretty much the same - or maybe even a little less.

The authors think these results suggest that the less religious are bound to others by emotional connection. They go on to say that:

 The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.

That seems likely. In fact, I think there's probably an additional factor here - because these studies took place in the USA,  where religion is the social norm.

It could be that religious people assume that the recipients of their generosity are co-religionists - in most US communities, that's a pretty strong likelihood. Therefore pro-social behaviour is less about pure altruism and more about group norms of back scratching and favours being returned - reciprocal altruism.

Atheists, on the other hand, may feel like outsiders, and so be less inclined to be pro-social - unless they are in a compassionate frame of mind for some reason.

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Saslow, L., Willer, R., Feinberg, M., Piff, P., Clark, K., Keltner, D., & Saturn, S. (2012). My Brother's Keeper? Compassion Predicts Generosity More Among Less Religious Individuals Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612444137

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Distrust of atheists is reduced if people have confidence in law and order

If you read this blog regularly, you'll have come across work by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Previously, they've shown that atheists in North America are are disliked because they are distrusted, and that untrustworthy people are often assumed to be atheists.

Why the distrust? Well, it's partly because they are an unknown quantity - many Americans never come across an open atheists - but also partly because people who think they are being watched at least claim to be trustworthy. Probably they think that other people will be trustworthy too, if they think they are being watched by a supernatural agent.

In new research, they've shown that the distrust that religious people have of atheists can at least partly be eased by subtly persuading them that the police are effective in stopping crime.

For example, in the study shown in the graphic, they showed students a video about police effectiveness and then, in a follow up survey, asked how distrustful they were of atheists and whether they disliked gays, Muslims or Jews. After they watched the video, their distrust of atheists dropped away.

Their prejudice towards other didn't change, however. In other studies, they also showed that distrust of gays was also not improved by this kind of manipulation, suggesting that it was specifically distrust of atheists that was being affected.

So this suggests that while religious people think that belief in god makes a person trustworthy, they're also open to the idea that secular authorities can also be a source of order and safety.

This puts me in mind of some other research by Aaron Kay and colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. They showed that, by pumping up belief that the government is in control, the desire to believe in a controlling god is weakened.

All more good evidence that one important factor that draws people to belief in God is fear and anxiety, and that stable social systems that are common in wealthy countries are contributing to the increasing numbers of non-believers.

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Gervais, W., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Reminders of Secular Authority Reduce Believers' Distrust of Atheists Psychological Science, 23 (5), 483-491 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611429711

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.