ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
The cultural evolutionary trade-off of ritualistic synchrony.
Review 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 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 84 citations in OpenAlex.
- Decoding Preschool Social Dynamics: Automated Tracking of Spatial and Temporal Patterns to Investigate Social Interactions and Relationships in Peer Groups.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Allied male dolphins use synchronous displays to strengthen social bonds in a cooperative context.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- Mourning ritual participation, subjective well-being and prosocial behaviour among the Luhya people of Kenya.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- GrooVR: an open access virtual reality drumming application to improve pro-sociality using synchronous movement.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Government environmental regulation and farmers' engagement in traditional folk practices: the mediating roles of ecological cognition and social norms.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- De-sync: disruption of synchronization as a key factor in individual and collective creative processes.BMC neuroscience · 2024Review
- Brainstorming: Interbrain coupling in groups forms the basis of group creativity.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Manifestations, social impact, and decay of conceptual beliefs: A cultural perspective.Brain and behavior · 2024Article
- An observation of a negative effect of social cohesion on creativity in musical improvisation.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Evidence for cultural differences in affect during mother-infant interactions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Editorial: Credition-An interdisciplinary approach to the nature of beliefs and believing.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Endogenous sources of interbrain synchrony in duetting pianists.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Synchrony During Online Encounters Affects Social Affiliation and Theory of Mind but Not Empathy.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Resonance as a Design Strategy for AI and Social Robots.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2022Article
- Believing and social interactions: effects on bodily expressions and personal narratives.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- A Framework on Polarization, Cognitive Inflexibility, and Rigid Cognitive Specialization.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Vocal learning as a preadaptation for the evolution of human beat perception and synchronization.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Dance Is More Than Meets the Eye-How Can Dance Performance Be Made Accessible for a Non-sighted Audience?Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
From Australia to the Arctic, human groups engage in synchronous behaviour during communal rituals. Because ritualistic synchrony is widespread, many argue that it is functional for human groups, encouraging large-scale cooperation and group cohesion. Here, we offer a more nuanced perspective on synchrony's function. We review research on synchrony's prosocial effects, but also discuss synchrony's antisocial effects such as encouraging group conflict, decreasing group creativity and increasing harmful obedience. We further argue that a tightness-looseness (TL) framework helps to explain this trade-off and generates new predictions for how ritualistic synchrony should evolve over time, where it should be most prevalent, and how it should affect group well-being. We close by arguing that synthesizing the literature on TL with the literature on synchrony has promise for understanding synchrony's role in a broader cultural evolutionary framework. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.
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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.