RITUAL ANIMAL Quotes

“What are the adaptive benefits of ritual participation, if any? One potential function of rituals is the role they play in generating social glue and driving cooperation. This glue appears to come in two main varieties: a very strong adhesive that motivates extreme self-sacrifice in small bands when facing challenging collective action problems such as outgroup threat, and a less powerful but highly spreadable adhesive that motivates conformism in much larger ‘imagined’ communities (such as nations or world religions), where group survival depends on being able to amass and centralize resources gathered from widely distributed populations.”
― Harvey Whitehouse, The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity

“Moral norms may differ cross-culturally not primarily because of histories of cultural transmission, but because different environments present varied cooperation problems that require different moral rules to solve”
― Harvey Whitehouse, RITUAL ANIMAL:IMITATION & COHESION IN EVOLUTION SOCIAL COMPLEXITY

“Swann, W. B., Jr., Gómez, A., Seyle, C., & Morales, F. (2009). Identity Fusion: The Interplay of Personal and Social Identities in Extreme Group Behaviour. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96: 995–1011. Swann, W. B., Jensen, Jolanda, Gómez, Ángel, Whitehouse, Harvey, & Bastian, Brock (2012). When Group Membership Gets Personal: A Theory of Identity Fusion. Psychological Review,”
― Harvey Whitehouse, The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity