Cross-Cultural Variation in Intuitions about Rituals: An Experimental Study Exploring how US and Japanese Respondents Assess Communities Associated with High Arousal Rituals

Rituals are a pervasive feature of human societies and a growing topic of empirical research in psychology. Recent research has argued that rituals activate universally shared features of cognition resulting in cross-culturally consistent responses, particularly in regards collective rituals ability to foster social cohesion. In the current study, we sought to compare whether intuitions related to high arousal collective rituals were consistent between respondents in two countries with distinctive ritual traditions, Japan and the United States. We used a between group experiment featuring vignettes that prompted participants to imagine themselves participating in a collective firewalking ritual or a (non-ritual) collective drumming performance and then asked them to provide intuitive assessments of the communities involved on a variety of socioecological measures. Our results, demonstrated largely consistent responses across both samples but notably rituals were associated with reduced social bonding when compared with the non-ritual scenario only in the Japan sample.