ArticleCognition2018
The early social significance of shared ritual actions.
Article in Cognition, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- How Do Similarity Cues Shape Children's Social Preference Inferences?Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Preverbal infants' understanding of social norms.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Infants are sensitive to the social signaling value of shared inefficient behaviors.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Social categorization based on permanent versus transient visual traits in neurotypical children and children with autism spectrum disorder.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Ritual and the origins of first impressions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Watch me, watch you: ritual participation increases in-group displays and out-group monitoring in children.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The Development of Social Categorization.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2019Article
- Five-month-old infants detect affiliation in colaughter.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- An experimental examination of object-directed ritualized action in children across two cultures.PloS one · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Many rituals are socially stipulated such that engaging in a group's rituals can fundamentally signal membership in that group. Here, we asked whether infants infer information about people's social affiliation based on whether those people perform the same ritualistic action versus different actions. We presented 16-month-old infants with two people who used the same object to achieve the same goal: turning on a light. In a first study, the actions that the actors used to turn on the light had key properties of ritual: they were not causally necessary to reach the overall goal, and there were no features of the situation that required doing the particular actions. We varied whether the two actors performed the same action or performed different actions to turn on the light. Infants expected people who used the same ritualistic action to be more likely to affiliate than people who used different actions. A second study indicated that these results were not due to perceptual similarity: when the differences in the actors' actions were not marked by properties of ritual, but were instead due to situational constraints, infants expected the actors to affiliate. Thus, infants understand the social significance of people engaging in common, potentially ritualistic actions, and expect these actions to provide information about third-party social relationships.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.