Does Performing Rituals Build Character?

Links Between Religions and Morality

The popular assumption that religiosity and morality are connected is widespread. Presumably, it is based on the inference that belief in a morally interested deity, who knows everything about people’s thoughts and actions, will spur believers to conduct themselves uprightly. They might be prompted to do so in light of their expectations about divine rewards or punishments or they may simply be motivated by less mercenary religious devotion. This account of the connection between religions and morality focuses on people’s distinctively religious beliefs.

A question arises, however, about possible connections between morality or at least what we would regard as the development of good character and people’s distinctively religious actions. In particular, does the performance of rituals foster ethical dispositions?

Mindless Ritual

Even the most devoted religious participants will usually concede that their frequent performances of rituals can from time to time devolve into automatic behavior. Their scripted ritual actions have become so familiar that they can occasionally lose sight of the religious significance that is attached to them. By contrast with the scripts for more pedestrian pursuits (say, the script for getting a meal at a restaurant), one of the distinctive features of ritualized behaviors is that in such circumstances even the simplest cues (noting an icon) can readily restore the heightened concern and attention to the details of the scripts associated with them. Still, religious participants’ frequent ritual performances can sometimes lapse into mindless routine.

Ritual performances, let alone mindless routines, hardly seem likely candidates for instilling virtues or fortifying humans’ moral convictions, especially when, on the face of it, the rituals in question have nothing to do with such matters. Assuming that measures of changes in morally relevant dispositions are feasible, the question lends itself to empirical investigation.

In his recent book, Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World, Harvey Whitehouse explores this question. He considers whether learning and carrying out ostensibly pointless rituals will lead to more self-discipline and less impulsivity in participants compared with learning and carrying out goal-directed instrumental skills. Whitehouse, Veronika Rybanska, and their colleagues devised an interesting experiment to test that hypothesis.

An Experiment in Character Building?

They recruited about a hundred 7-year-old children in each of the small central European country of Slovakia and the Melanesian island nation of Vanuatu. At the outset of the study, they took measures of each of the children’s abilities:

1. to control their bodily movements deliberately by following instructions to carry out particular motions
2. to demonstrate executive function by examining their capacity to move their bodies in ways that were (as specified to them beforehand) systematically contrary to the instructions that they heard (so, for example, they were to touch their toes when told to touch their heads)
3. to delay gratification by resisting the temptation to even touch a treat for a fixed amount of time on the promise that if they were successful, they would receive two treats.

Then the 100 from each country were divided into three groups: a ritual group, an instrumental group, and a control group. Twice per week for 30-45 minutes for the next three months, the ritual and instrumental groups participated in “circle games.” In the ritual condition, experimenters stressed the importance of rule-following and told the children “it has always been done this way.” In the instrumental condition, the experimenters told the children that the games would enable them to learn about animals.

At the end of the three months, all of the children were retested in the same three capacities. Crucially, Whitehouse, Rybanska, and their colleagues got the same findings with the children from both countries, suggesting that major cultural differences had little or no effect. In both countries, the control group children had progressed the least. The children in the instrumental condition did a good deal better, but the children in the ritual condition improved most of all. The children who, in effect, did these meaningless rituals repeatedly exhibited the greatest gains in their abilities to control their bodily movements as instructed, defer gratification, and exercise executive function. These skills alone hardly constitute moral maturity, but all three are integral to character development and human flourishing.