All known human societies have rituals – activities that are singled out and endowed with special meaning and significance. Many rituals are enacted within modern secular institutions, during such events as committee meetings, award ceremonies, and sports matches. Nevertheless, the most diverse and elaborate rituals can be found among religious groups, whose members have long cultivated ritualistic practices like prayer (Bremner, Koole, & Bushman, 2011), meditation (Cahn & Polich, 2006), fasting (Sabate, 2004), ceremonial cleansing (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), pilgrimages (Coleman & Elsner, 1995), religious holidays (Fiese & Tomcho, 2001), and even ritual sex (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2000). Why are the lives of countless people pervaded by religious rituals? The answer, according to Wood in the target article, lies in the social and psychological advantages that religious rituals bestow on their practitioners. From Wood’s perspective, religious rituals can be seen as psychological exercises that strengthen people’s capacity for self-control. Moreover, religious rituals may enhance people’s social standing, by providing public displays of willpower and commitment to the group. Wood’s provocative analysis of religious rituals highlights the behavioral side of religion. This theoretical focus is highly welcome, given that modern psychology of religion has often restricted itself to the contents of people’s religious beliefs. This restrictiveness has hindered progress, because the psychological meaning of religious beliefs cannot be understood without considering religious behavior. For instance, people may subscribe to a religious worldview even when they rarely act upon them. Conversely, people may enact religious rituals even when they have not embraced a religious worldview, such as self-avowed atheists who unexpectedly find themselves praying during moments of crisis. In short, people’s religious beliefs may or may not correspond with their religious behavior. It is therefore vital to extend the scientific analysis of religion to religious behavior, for instance as it is enacted during religious rituals. Wood’s general idea that religious rituals facilitate self-regulation is consistent with our prior theorizing in this area (Koole, McCullough, Kuhl, & Roelofsma, 2010). Relative to our work, however, Wood places more emphasis on the effortful aspects of self-regulation. Wood’s emphasis fits with traditional views of self-regulation as a wholly conscious and effortful process that is continually at war with people’s more automatic inclinations. Nevertheless, we believe that a broader view of self-regulation is warranted, in light of growing evidence that adaptive self-regulation is based on the coordinated interplay between effortful and automatic processes (Kuhl, Quirin, & Koole, 2015). For instance, a recent meta-analysis showed that, compared with their less self-controlled counterparts, people with better self-control are more adept at forming habits that are aligned with their consciously held goals and objectives (de Ridder, Lensvelt-Mulders, Finkenauer, Stok, & Baumeister, 2012). Consequently, if religious rituals indeed improve self-regulation, then we may expect religious rituals to recruit both explicit (effortful) and implicit (more automatic) processes. One implicit route whereby religious rituals may facilitate self-regulation is by priming contents that are consistent with people’s religious values (Shariff, Willard, Andersen, & Norenzayan, 2016). In prayer, for instance, Christian believers typically activate mental representations of God that are similar to mental representations of other people (Epley, Converse, Delbosc, Monteleone, & Cacioppo, 2009; Kapogiannis et al., 2009; Schjoedt, Stødkilde-Jørgensen, Geertz, & Roepstorff, 2009). Once activated, thoughts about God may therefore carry over to people’s perceptions of their fellow mortals. Because Christian conceptions of God are typically positive, praying to God may prime more positive social perceptions. To test this presumed sequence, we experimentally manipulated whether a group of Dutch Christians prayed for or thought about a person in need, after which they judged a series of target persons (Meijer, Bushman, & Koole, 2015). As expected, prayer led to more positive perceptions of the target persons, especially among participants who viewed God in positive terms. Similar priming processes may explain why prayer and meditation can promote benevolence in interpersonal relationships (Bremner et al., 2011; Fincham, Lambert, & Beach, 2010; Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008). Beyond priming, religious rituals may help people to align their implicit and explicit responses, a process that is integral to effective self-regulation (Baumann, Kaschel, & Kuhl, 2005). All major religious traditions have emphasized the value of inner peace (Kuhl et al., 2015). At least some religious rituals may hence be directed towards resolving people’s inner conflicts. An example may be mindfulness meditation, a traditionally Buddhist practice in which people focus their attention on present feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations in an open, accepting, and non-judgmental manner (Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2002). Because mindfulness may make people more inclined to regard their implicit responses as valid (Koole, Govorun, Cheng, & Gallucci, 2009), conflicts between implicit and explicit responses may be more actively confronted and resolved during states of mindfulness (Teper, Segal, & Inzlicht, 2013). In line with these ideas, mindfulness has been found to promote greater coherence between explicit and implicit responses (Crescentini & Capurso, 2015). For instance, Remmers, Topolinski, and Koole (in press) observed that participants who had completed a brief mindfulness exercise displayed a stronger correlation between implicit and explicit mood than participants who had completed a control exercise. Mindfulness practices may thus promote emotional coherence between implicit and explicit systems (see Evers et al., 2014, for a discussion of emotional coherence). It would be worth examining if these findings extend to other religious rituals besides prayer. For instance, fasting may heighten interoceptive awareness (Herbert et al., 2012), a mental state that may increase the alignment of implicit and explicit responses (Thrash, Elliot, & Schultheiss, 2007). Furthermore, religious rituals may help people to discover greater meaning and purpose in life, which also rely on coherence formation (Heintzelman, Trent, & King, 2013). In sum, we concur with Wood that religious rituals may have important benefits for self-regulation. However, the pathways whereby religious rituals may yield self-regulatory benefits may be more diverse than Wood suggests. Religious rituals may facilitate not only effortful self-control among their practitioners, but also implicit forms of self-regulation, and improve the alignment between explicit and implicit processes. Through these multiple routes, religious rituals may function as tools for adaptive self-regulation.
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Why are rituals important in religion
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