Harvey Whitehouse is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the evolution of social complexity. One of the founders of the cognitive science of religion, Harvey is well known for his theory of “modes of religiosity,” which explains how the frequency and emotional intensity of collective rituals influence the scale and structure of religious organisations.

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The Ritual Animal

The ritual animal longs to belong. Rituals are a way of defining the boundaries of social groups and binding their members together. The ritual modes theory seeks to unravel the psychology behind these processes – to explain how ritual behaviour evolved and how different modes of ritual performance have shaped global history over many millennia. Testing the theory has meant designing experiments run with children in psychology labs and on remote Pacific islands, gathering survey data with armed insurgents in the Middle East and Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia, monitoring heartrate and stress among football fans in Brazil, and measuring changes in the brain as people observe traditional Chinese rituals in Singapore. The results of all this research point to new ways of addressing cooperation problems: from preventing violent extremism to motivating action on the climate crisis.

Collective rituals bind groups together—we could think of such rituals as gadgets for making social glue. Different kinds of rituals produce different intensities of commitment to group values and causes and also influence the size and internal structure of groups. Understanding these processes is important to explaining how cultural groups grow and contract, how they extract resources, and how they compete with each other—whether in the form of violent conflict or strategic alliance. As well as investigating the proximate mechanisms that underlie these intricate processes in human society and history, Harvey is interested in the processes of cultural selection that have shaped the evolution of bands, chiefdoms, states, and empires.