The early social significance of shared ritual actions.

ABSTRACT: Many rituals are socially stipulated such that engaging in a group's rituals can fundamentally signal membership in that group. Here, we asked whether infants infer information about people's social affiliation based on whether those people perform the same ritualistic action versus different actions. We presented 16-month-old infants with two people who used the same object to achieve the same goal: turning on a light. In a first study, the actions that the actors used to turn on the light had key properties of ritual: they were not causally necessary to reach the overall goal, and there were no features of the situation that required doing the particular actions. We varied whether the two actors performed the same action or performed different actions to turn on the light. Infants expect

SUBMITTER: Liberman Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5818307 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature