ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Ritual explained: interdisciplinary answers to Tinbergen's four questions.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 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
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- An "Eight Perspectives" framework to describe complex psychobehavioral phenomena.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Effects of Joint Action Observation on Children's Imitation.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Leverage the power of ritual to improve community health worker efficacy and public health outcomes: Lessons from Bihar, India.The Lancet regional health. Southeast Asia · 2022Review
- A Review of Infectious Diseases Associated with Religious and Nonreligious Rituals.Interdisciplinary perspectives on infectious diseases · 2021Review
- Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Future Directions on BIPOC Youth Mental Health: The Importance of Cultural Rituals in the COVID-19 Pandemic.Journal of clinical child and adolescent psychology : the official journal for the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 53Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Convergent developments across social scientific disciplines provide evidence that rituals are a psychologically prepared and culturally inherited behavioural hallmark of our species. The dramatic diversity of ritual practices ranges from simple greetings to elaborate religious ceremonies, from the benign to life-threatening. Yet our scientific understanding of this core human trait remains limited. Explaining the universality, functionality and diversity of ritual requires insight from multiple disciplines. This special issue integrates research from anthropology, archaeology, biology, primatology, cognitive science, psychology, religious studies and demography to build an interdisciplinary account of ritual. The objective is to contribute to an integrative explanation of ritual by addressing Tinbergen's four key questions. These include answering ultimate questions about the (i) phylogeny and (ii) adaptive functions of ritual; and proximate questions about the (iii) mechanisms and (iv) ontogeny of ritual. The intersection of these four complementary lines of inquiry yields new avenues for theory and research into this fundamental aspect of the human condition, and in so doing, into the coevolution of cognition and culture. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.
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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.