Matt J. Rossano

The essential role of ritual in the transmission and reinforcement of social norms.

Social norms are communally agreed upon, morally significant behavioral standards that are, at least in part, responsible for uniquely human forms of cooperation and social organization. This article summarizes evidence demonstrating that ritual and ritualized behaviors are essential to the transmission and reinforcement of social norms. Ritualized behaviors reliably signal an intentional mental state giving credibility to verbal expressions while emotionally binding people to each other and group-based values. Early ritualized infant-caregiver interactions and the family routines and rituals that emerge from them are primary mechanisms for transmitting social norms vertically from parent to offspring, while adult community rituals are a primary mechanism by which norms are reinforced horizontally within the community.

Supernaturalizing Social Life

This paper examines three ancient traits of religion whose origins likely date back to the Upper Paleolithic: ancestor worship, shamanism, and the belief in natural and animal spirits. Evidence for the emergence of these traits coincides with evidence for a dramatic advance in human social cooperation. It is argued that these traits played a role in the evolution of human cooperation through the mechanism of social scrutiny. Social scrutiny is an effective means of reducing individualism and enhancing prosocial behavior. Religion’s most ancient traits represent an extension of the human social world into the supernatural, thus reinforcing within-group cooperation by means of ever-vigilant spiritual monitors. Believing that the spirits were always watching may have helped reduce the number of non-cooperators within a group while reinforcing group behavioral norms, thus allowing humanlike levels of cooperation to emerge.

Expertise and the evolution of consciousness.

This paper argues that expertise can be used as an indicator of consciousness in humans and other animals. The argument is based on the following observations: (1) expertise and skill acquisition require deliberate practice; and (2) the characteristics of deliberate practice such as performance evaluation against a more proficient model, retention of voluntary control over actions, self-monitoring, goal-setting, error-detection and correction, and the construction of hierarchically organized retrieval structures are outside of the currently understood bounds of unconscious processing. Thus, to the extent that evidence of expertise exists in an organism, evidence of conscious experience is also present. Two important implications arise from this conclusion: (1) evidence of expertise can be used as the basis for cross-species comparisons of consciousness; and (2) the evolution of human consciousness can be assessed using fossil evidence of skilled behavior as a measure of consciousness.

Ritual Behaviour and the Origins of Modern Cognition

This article argues that ritual behaviour was a critical selective force in the emergence of modern cognition. The argument is based on the following observations: (1) Upper Palaeolithic Cro-Magnons exhibited unprecedented levels of social complexity and there is evidence to suggest that this complexity may have begun even earlier in Africa, possibly connected with the Toba eruption. (2) Creating larger, more complex social arrangements, especially those that cut across traditional within-group boundaries, would have required more elaborate and demanding social rituals. (3) Ritual behaviour requiring focused attention and the inhibition of pre-potent responses places demands on areas of the brain known to be associated with working memory. (4) An enhancement of working-memory capacity was very likely necessary for the emergence of modern cognition. (5) The social rituals of traditional societies, which provide the best window on the social rituals of our ancestors, are highly demanding in terms of maintaining focused attention and inhibiting pre-potent responses. (6) Those of our ancestors best able to successfully engage in ritual behaviour would have accrued fitness advantages from increased access to resources, status enhancements and psychophysical health effects. (7) Larger working-memory capacity was very likely a characteristic of these more ritually-capable hominins.

Did Meditating Make Us Human

Campfire rituals of focused attention created Baldwinian selection for enhanced working memory among our Homo sapiens ancestors. This model is grounded in five propositions: the emergence of symbolism occurred late in the archaeological record; this emergence was caused by a fortuitous genetic mutation that enhanced working memory capacity; a Baldwinian process where genetic adaptation follows somatic adaptation was the mechanism for this emergence; meditation directly affects brain areas critical to attention and working memory; and shamanistic healing rituals were fitness-enhancing in our ancestral past. Each proposi tion is discussed and defended. Supporting evidence and potential future tests are presented.

Goal Specificity and the Acquisition of Survey Knowledge

Studies of route and survey knowledge have been inconclusive regarding whether survey knowledge is an inevitable outgrowth of extensive route knowledge. The current study examines one factor affecting the development of survey knowledge from route knowledge: goal specificity. Goal specificity refers to the extent to which an explicit goal exists to which problem-solving activities are directed. Past studies have shown that goal specificity inhibits the development of schematic representations. Using computer-simulated navigation about a novel campus environment, goal specificity was found to interfere with the acquisition of survey knowledge. Practically speaking, this implies that when getting to a goal is of primary concern, the development of survey knowledge may be inhibited even after extensive direct experience.

The Moral Faculty: Does Religion Promote “Moral Expertise”?

Research on the moral faculty indicates that morality emerges naturally over the course of normal human development, similar to other competencies such as face perception, language, numerical reasoning, and some motor skills (running, jumping, etc.). One implication of this is that there should be a roughly normal distribution of moral skills. Thus, while most people develop competent moral skills, a few fail to develop these skills and a few develop them to an “expert” level. The skill development literature indicates that deliberate practice is necessary for the acquisition of expertise. Religious participation appears to provide the basic elements of deliberate “moral practice.” Empirical evidence is reviewed supporting the notion that religion provides the means and opportunity for the acquisition of moral expertise. A program of research into moral expertise is proposed with testable hypotheses presented.

Setting Our Own Terms: How We Used Ritual to Become Human

Archeological evidence of the sophisticated cognitive attributes thought to define humanity – such as symbolism, language, theory of mind, and a spiritual sense – is, by and large, late-emerging (after 50,000 years before present [ybp]), postdating the emergence of anatomically modern humans (AMH). This suggests that the relevant selection pressures for these abilities did not emerge until after the arrival of the fully human body and brain. I argue that this stands to reason to reason since the selection pressure responsible for the emergence of uniquely human cognition was human-made. Human culture created human cognition. The key facet of that culture was ritual. Ritual selection pressure filtered Homo sapiens sapiens for the very cognitive attributes that made us what we are today.

The African Interregnum: The “Where,” “When,” and “Why” of the Evolution of Religion

Anatomically modern humans (AMH) emerged about 200,000 years before present (ybp) in Africa , initially differing little from other hominin species . Sometime after 100,000 ybp, Neanderthals displaced AMH from the Levant region of the Middle East, ending their first excursion out of their African homeland. About 60,000 ybp, a more socially sophisticated strain of AMH expanded once again out of Africa and replaced all resident hominins worldwide. A crucial aspect of their increased social sophistication was religion. It was during the time between their retreat from the Levant to their conquest of the world (The African Interregnum) that religion emerged. Using archeological, anthropological, psychological, and primatological evidence, this chapter proposes a theoretical model for the evolutionary emergence of religion – an emergence that is pin-pointed temporally to the ecological and social crucible that was Africa from about 80,000 to 60,000 ybp, when Homo sapiens (but for the grace of God?) nearly vanished from the earth.

Cognitive Control: Social Evolution and Emotional Regulation

This commentary argues that theories of cognitive control risk being incomplete unless they incorporate social/emotional factors. Social factors very likely played a critical role in the evolution of human cognitive control abilities, and emotional states are the primary regulatory mechanisms of cognitive control.