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Why do people engage in religious rituals?
In keeping with suggestion of ethologist Niko Tinbergen, this question is actually four separate “why” questions. Rather than dealing with the first three Why questions (Phylogeny, Ontogeny or Function), I’d like to consider only the fourth Why, Proximate Cause, with regard to the practice of engaging in religious rituals. In other words, this post will consider the bodily machinery that leads people to attend religious rituals: the immediate payoff to the human animal.
Many believers would answer this question by introspecting. Believers have often told me that they go to church because they “experience God.” [How strange that God doesn’t so often hang out in the home, at cocktail parties or in Las Vegas!]. Many believers thus think that you can simply think about thinking to figure out why they do things. Numerous and repeated experiments have proven introspection to be woefully unreliable, however.
For instance, in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” [Psychological Review 84, pp. 231-259.] They allowed female subjects to examine and select stockings. The subjects offered lots of reasons for why they selected the stockings they selected (they spoke of such things as texture and sheerness). Unbeknown to them, the stockings were identical. This and numerous additional experiments robustly demonstrate that people, though they always gave reasons for their choices, are often mistaken. “Inner workings of important aspects of the mind, including our own …
