In contrast to a perceptible threat that releases freezing, fleeing and fighting, abstract potential threat elicits anxiety and vigilance. The prevalent view is that the larger the animal groups the lower the individual vigilance. Vigilance is a reflection of anxiety, and here we show that anxiety is contagious in grouped social animals. In humans, anxiety frequently results in rituals that con...

Ethnographic, historical, archaeological and experimental work suggests the existence of two basic clusters of ritual dynamics or ‘modes of religiosity’ — a low-frequency, high-arousal cluster linked to the formation of small cohesive communities (imagistic mode) and highfrequency, low-arousal cluster associated with larger, more centralized social morphology (doctrinal mode). Currently, howeve...

Reestablishing feelings of control in the face of uncertainty is a fundamental motive for human behavior. We propose that rituals (i.e., socially stipulated, causally opaque practices) provide a means for coping with the aversive feelings associated with randomness due to the perception of a connection between ritual action and a desired outcome. Two experiments were conducted (one in Brazil [N...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kib...

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an org...

The objectives of this historical-social study are: to describe the circumstances that determined the participation of North American nurses in the formation of the Brazilian nurse; and analyse the process of implementing institutional rituals as a strategy of symbolic fight, to confer visibility to the nurse profession and discuss the symbolic effects of institutional rituals for the consecrat...

The concept of a prodrome, or the very earliest signs of the onset of a mental disorder, is well known in clinical psychiatry, and refers to disturbances of ordinary behaviour that may precede the behaviour and experiences that constitute recognised psychiatric symptoms and signs. In the literature, however, prodromes are described simply by means of lists of behaviours, such as avoidance of me...

In this chapter, I compare organizational rituals of risk and error in two U.S. government agencies: The Federal Aviation Administration's National Air Traffic System (NATS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). I take the position that all organizations, even those categorized as High Reliability Organizations, are subject to routine nonconformity: they regularly produc...

abstract         sasanian dynasty, who governed as the last and the most glorious dynasty before islam in iran, has had an important role in enrichment of sasanian silver works and we owe the majority of silver works to this era. metalwork is one of the oldest arts iniranian civilization. the prominent metalwork crafts‚ left from different ages‚ acknowledge this fact. the art of this era has di...