The Price of Being Social: The Role of Emotions in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 102

6.2 Rituals and Emotions

The emotional phenomenon is particularly linked with a specific mechanism that
presides over the maintenance of social order, namely, ritual. Our early assumption
is that, by taking a phylogenetic perspective and looking at the animal kingdom, one
of the most powerful mechanisms by which groups may be formed and coordinated
seems to be represented by ritual activity. For instance, many primates use the ritual
of social grooming to cultivate and reinforce social bonds with others upon whom
they rely for coalitionary support (Cords 1997 ; Dunbar 1991 ). Further, as we will
discuss shortly, many social animals make use of emotionally charged rituals to
respond to social conflicts (e.g., Aureli and de Waal 2000 ; Castles and Whiten 1998 ;
de Waal and Lanting 1997 ). As it is generally well known, rituals are affiliative
behaviors which also characterize human societies. They include various forms
of worship and religious organizations, ceremonies and inaugurations, marriages,
funerals, parties, symposia, as well as common acts like handshaking and saying
hello. Considering its pervading diffusion in various social structures, from our point
of view, a ritual can be considered as a hand lens in order to explore how the opposite
forces embodied by emotions bind together and divide social groups.
Firstly, why does the brain create rituals? Many scholars have focused on
complex human rituals such as religion describing the nature of ritual in general
as a psychological invention constructed by humans in order to live with the fear of
death and the uncertainty of things. In the wake of this belief, some theories (e.g.,
Lienard and Boyer 2006 ) have claimed that ritual behavior has an ancillary function
and thus in evolutionary terms can simply be defined as an “accident” caused by the
malfunctioning of cognitive devices developed for other purposes rather than a sheer
natural phenomenon. Though such claims are so widespread, many scholars point
out that ritual behaviors are rooted in the biology of brain also because of their social
adaptive value. To this extent, social animals at different degrees are biologically
bound to perform rituals. In particular, according to a class of models pertaining
to philosophical anthropology, namely, “social solidarity theories” (Alcorta and
Sosis 2005 ), in the evolutionary history, ritual has emerged in order to support the
construction of social structure binding groups together. For instance, Bering ( 2006 )
argues that ritual may have had a role in shaping a propensity for altruism starting
from the feelings of empathy and attachment developed in collective ritual practices.
More generally, as ritual represents a pervasive phenomenon in social species, the
idea that it is a secondary “gadget” seems to be a little likely (Ferretti and Adornetti
2014 ). How could cognitive mechanisms that make organisms to perform time-
consuming rituals be selected for, unless these activities played some evolutionary
functions (Bering 2006 )?
The idea that the ritual phenomenon might represent a binding tool promoting
social cognition meets reliable clues. Actually, the transposition of ordinary behav-
iors in ritualized displays primarily concerns the communication of social infor-
mation (Rowe 1999 ) as in the courtship context. Although these ritualized forms
involve time and resource costs, they offer important evidence about conspecifics