Rituals are a way of defining the boundaries of social groups and binding their members together. In this lecture, Professor Harvey Whitehouse seeks to unravel the psychology behind these processes, to explain how ritual behaviour evolved and how different kinds of ritual performance have shaped global history over many millennia.

Efforts to test the ‘ritual modes’ theory have used a wide variety of methods, ranging from field research, large scale multi-country surveys and controlled experiments, to mathematical modelling and quantitative analysis of archaeological, ethnographic and historical datasets. The results of this research point to new ways of addressing cooperation problems in the twenty-first century: from preventing violent extremism and tackling crime to managing global pandemics and motivating action on the climate crisis.