Abstract
From Australia to the Arctic, human groups engage in synchronous behaviour during communal rituals. Because ritualistic synchrony is widespread, many argue that it is functional for human groups, encouraging large-scale cooperation and group cohesion. Here, we offer a more nuanced perspective on synchrony's function. We review research on synchrony's prosocial effects, but also discuss synchrony's antisocial effects such as encouraging group conflict, decreasing group creativity and increasing harmful obedience. We further argue that a tightness–looseness (TL) framework helps to explain this trade-off and generates new predictions for how ritualistic synchrony should evolve over time, where it should be most prevalent, and how it should affect group well-being. We close by arguing that synthesizing the literature on TL with the literature on synchrony has promise for understanding synchrony's role in a broader cultural evolutionary framework.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.
Highlights
Over 100 years ago, in the Yaghan peninsula at the southern-most tip of South America, the Yamana people practised an elaborate initiation ritual
Afterwards, the group danced in single file, chanting a song together [2]. These initiation rites are starkly different in many ways, but they do share a feature that recurs in societies around the world: ritualistic synchrony
Recent studies even show that moralizing beliefs emerge during times of ecological threat and conflict [100,101], much like cultural tightness. This raises the intriguing possibility that ritualistic synchrony and moralizing high god belief serve many of the same cultural evolutionary functions, and may 6 emerge in the same kinds of societies
Summary
Over 100 years ago, in the Yaghan peninsula at the southern-most tip of South America, the Yamana people practised an elaborate initiation ritual. Across the world in northern Australia, the Tiwi people engaged in a very different initiation ritual involving young men who jumped over a firepit. Afterwards, the group danced in single file, chanting a song together [2] These initiation rites are starkly different in many ways, but they do share a feature that recurs in societies around the world: ritualistic synchrony. Even though they were separated by tens of thousands of kilometres and their ancestry diverged thousands of years ago, the Tiwi and Yamana people each practised the same forms of synchronous dancing and singing, and they are far from alone. By integrating synchrony with research on TL, we begin to understand synchrony’s role in a broader cultural evolutionary framework
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