Aerobic exercise as a potential way to improve self-control after ego-depletion in healthy female college students. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 501.

Synchrony — intentional, rhythmic motor entrainment in groups — is an important topic in social psychology and the cognitive science of religion. Synchrony has been found to increase trust and prosociality, to index interpersonal attention, and to induce perceptions of similarity and group cohesion. Causal explanations suggest that synchrony induces neurocognitive self-other blurring, leading participants to process one another as identical. In light of such findings, researchers have highlighted synchrony as an important evolved tool for establishing and maintaining collective identity in human groups, particularly within ritual and religious contexts. However, many aspects of group life require coordination rather than mere prosocial cooperation. In coordinative contexts, interpersonal relations and motor sequences are often complementary rather than identical, and leadership hierarchies streamline group decisions. It is thus unclear whether synchrony would benefit or hamper group outcomes in contexts requiring complex interdependent coordination and hierarchy. In a two-condition experimental paradigm, we tested the effects of synchrony on the outcomes of a three-person, complex verbal coordination task. Groups in the synchrony condition performed more poorly on the coordination exercise and reported higher levels of conflict as well as lower levels of group cohesion and similarity. We interpret these results as indicating boundary conditions on the prosocial effects of synchrony: in settings that require complex, interdependent social coordination, the self-other blurring induced by synchrony is situationally inappropriate. These findings dovetail with the anthropological observation that real-world ritual is often focused on establishing and reinforcing social distinctions rather than social unison.

Few outstanding questions in the human behavioral sciences are timelier or more urgently debated than the evolutionary source of religious behaviors and beliefs. Byproduct theorists locate the origins of religion in evolved cognitive defaults and transmission biases. Others have argued that cultural evolutionary processes integrated non-adaptive cognitive byproducts into coherent networks of supernatural beliefs and ritual that encouraged in-group cooperativeness, while adaptationist models assert that the cognitive and behavioral foundations of religion have been selected for at more basic levels. Here, we survey these differing approaches, noting their respective strengths and weaknesses. We then advance a novel model that centers on the ability of language to generate alternative worlds independent of immediate empirical facts, and thus highlight the similarities between religious belief and the modes of cognition that underlie institutions in general. The institutional cognition model of religion accounts for some of the shortcomings of extant approaches and draws attention to the human ability to create non-empirical worlds; that is, worlds that are imaginary. Both religious beliefs and institutional facts—such as jurisdictional borders—are non-empirical assertions, yet they are socially accepted as truths and reified through ritual and behavior. One type of non-empirical, linguistically generated belief—supernatural agent belief—is particularly effective for stabilizing systems of arbitrary norms by rooting them in deontic rather than utilitarian reasoning. The evolutionary roots and continued persistence of religion are thus functions of the capacity for humans to generate cognitive alternatives to empirical reality, and the need to stably coordinate those alternative conceptions.

The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo-Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral motivations that make few references to others' intentional states. Using synchrony and dance as paradigmatic examples of antistructural ritual that stimulate religious ASCs, I assemble literature from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language to offer fruitful empirical predictions and opportunities for testing based on this framework. Among the empirical predictions is that antistructural ritual may provide for cultural change in religions when religions are construed as complex adaptive systems.

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