The Impact of Ritual on Child Cognition

Veronika Rybanska

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350108936
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Psychology of Religion

In this book, Veronika Rybanska explores how ritual participation affects the cognitive abilities of children. Rybanska argues that, far from being a simple matter of mindless copying, ritual participation in childhood requires rigorous computation by cognitive mechanisms. In turn, this computation can improve a child's 'executive functioning': a set of cognitive skills that are essential for successful cognitive, social and psychological development. After providing a critique of existing literature on religion and ritual, Rybanska presents a new interdisciplinary approach that draws from anthropology, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Using cross-cultural examples, including a comparison between Melanesian culture and Western culture, Rybanska shows that some of the most socially important effects of rituals seem to be universal. The implications of this research suggest that we should rethink multiple aspects of child-rearing and educational policy, and shows that the presence of some form of ritual during childhood could have positive evolutionary benefits.

1

Introduction

Modern society increasingly promotes things that are ‘fast’ or even immediate. Nobody wants to wait for anything and people often choose goods and services based on how fast they can deliver their promised results. As a striking contrast, many aspects of human social life require that things take time in order to be done to their fullest. For example, we emphasize to our children to stay in school and study for years to achieve a more successful life, or we even forego many religious prohibitions in order to receive divine compensation in this life or (depending on one’s tradition) the afterlife or next life. This prompts the question: Why are we willing to wait to receive a reward later, even years and years later? This book attempts to shed some light on this question by examining the effect of ritual participation on our ability to delay gratification.

In modern society, manufacturers and advertisers constantly promise to gratify our needs on demand and reduce our waiting times. Shampoos are 2 in 1 (because who has time for conditioner?), the internet is high speed (because watching the little spinning wheel drives people crazy), food must be ‘fast’ (because who has the time to cook, or even wait for someone else to cook for us?). Indeed, all kinds of goods and services are increasingly advertised with a promise that production, delivery, consumption and sometimes all three will be instantaneous. Such advertising comes with the promise of saving time that you can use to do things that you ‘actually’ like, things that ‘really matter’. You can spend less time washing your hair and more time with your family and friends, nagging them to put down their phones with high speed internet access to a universe of information at their fingertips – nothing like quality time spent with your loved ones! However, when we think about the things that ‘really matter’, the goals that are highly desirable in life benefit from long-term planning and waiting: for example, pursuing a degree, choosing a partner, planning a family, leaving a job or buying a house. The gratification or final reward for all of these examples only come after months or even years of waiting. And, as we all know, waiting is not easy. Yet, we work to achieve at least some of these goals, investing time, money, physical resources and emotional effort into delaying our gratification. In this book, I overview a new approach to ritual and child development that argues that rituals increase a child’s ability to delay gratification, which have significant positive socioeconomic effects for them later in life and could be critical to our understanding of the development of rituals in cultures and religions.

Deciding to delay gratification, defined as the ability to resist a smaller but more immediate reward in order to receive a greater but delayed reward, typically involves weighing up the relative benefits and costs of waiting (Mischel, Ebbesen and Zeiss 1972). That means that even though you know something might take time and effort to achieve, you still aim to achieve it because it is worth your while. Situations in which we find ourselves considering delaying gratification may involve predicting or anticipating the future state of our self and others, and assessing how current behaviour can influence these future states. For example, we might ask ourselves ‘will I ever be happy with this person?’ (predicting the future state of one’s self) or ‘is this person’s behaviour going to be compatible with my expectations?’ (predicting future state of another) and your judgement that they are okay for now (current behaviour) could frame whether or not they will be okay in ten years (future states).

Even though the examples included so far mostly concerned adult life, our abilities to employ cognitive skills that we need for delaying gratification are developed long before we can fully engage them. Earlier research suggests that children as young as three are able to reason about hypothetical futures (Kuczaj and Daly 1979) and use future-oriented language when describing possible events for the future (Atance and O’Neill 2005; Hudson, Fivush and Kuebli 1992; Nelson 1986; O’Neill and Atance 2000). For example, young children can give a simple account of what happens when you bake cookies or go to a friend’s house, go to school or play with a friend. Granted, they might not be able to predict every aspect of what might happen, but they can give you a reliable description that is based on their past experiences and knowledge. A child’s life is full of situations in which they must engage in surprisingly complex cognitive tasks like representing their future selves (e.g. being rewarded for waiting for something) and delaying gratification (shout out a response to teacher’s question instead of raising one’s hand and waiting to be called on). Often we, as adults, overlook this because we pay little attention to the world of our children and mostly assume that today’s children receive everything with a silver spoon (naturally, we all think we had it much harder when we were kids). Even with all the knowledge, reason, arguments and cognitive abilities we have as adults, we know how difficult some situations can get and how many of us quit long before we achieve our goals simply because we cannot bear it any longer. Now imagine how hard it must be for a four-year-old, who is still developing and learning a lot about the world. Or rather, instead of imagining children as imperfect versions of adults, imagine how strong and smart children really are to be able to navigate these situations at such an early age, with their cognitive abilities still going through major developmental changes.

It is now widely accepted that childhood is the most intense period of life when it comes to learning cultural behaviours and specific ways of meaning-creation. Because most of our crucial cultural and social information is acquired during childhood, we cannot provide a full explanation of any aspect of our cognitive abilities without looking at how and when they develop. Without taking into account children’s cognition, the ways how children’s minds are organized, and the ways its architecture influences and shapes information acquisition, we are left with a partial explanation at best.

1.1 One candy now or two candies later?

It has been more than forty years since psychologist Walter Mischel placed a cookie in front of a group of preschool children, giving them the tempting choice to either eat the cookie immediately or wait until he came back and receive two cookies (Mischel and Ebbesen 1970; Mischel, Ebbesen and Zeiss 1972; Mischel and Baker 1975; Mischel and Grusec 1967; Mischel and Moore 1973). Some of the children could not resist and ate the cookie either immediately or before he came back. However, some children were able to curb their desire for immediate gratification. Although one result of the experiment is a multitude of funny v ideos of children struggling not to eat a piece of candy, the experiment had a very important outcome: Mischel found that children who were able to resist the cookie (termed as ‘high-delay children’) and wait were, ten years later (as teenagers), better able to cope with stress and frustrations and were described by their parents as more socially competent, verbally fluent, attentive, rational and able to plan (Walter Mischel, Shoda and Rodriguez 1989). Moreover, these children performed better academically, achieving on average SAT scores 210 points higher than those of children who had experienced difficulties in delaying gratification. These results led to many replications and variations of the experiment, designed to understand the psychological processes that allow children to exercise control over their behaviour.

It is important to note that whether or not children decide to delay gratification, all normally developing children assess the benefits and costs similarly. That is to say, while a child’s behavioural outcome may be different, the cognitive mechanisms by which they make the decisions are similar. Children are perfectly capable of discerning which choice a ‘clever’ child would make (a choice that would bring more befit or greater reward) and which choice would be made by a ‘stupid’ child (a choice that would bring less benefit, smaller reward) (Nisan and Koriat 1977). However, such considerations do not determine a child’s actual choice – although children are well aware and even able to articulate and explain which choice is more advantageous, they themselves might not necessarily make that choice. Similar to those of us in the adult world, even when we are able to discern which choice would be more rational or advantageous (such as studying for a test to pass it) we very often do not make that choice (and instead of studying, binge-watch our favourite show). Rather than considering all of the pros and cons of the available choices, the choice depends on different attentional and cognitive strategies employed during the waiting periods.

Interestingly, recent research shows that the ability to delay gratification remains stable into adulthood. A follow-up study to Mischel’s earlier work shows that children who were better able to delay gratification as four-year-olds were able to resist various immediate temptations as adults forty years later (Casey et al. 2011).

In one of his studies Walter Mischel asks: ‘Can … the ability to delay gratification be taught?’ (Mischel and Ayduk 2004, 100). This is indeed an important question, considering the important long-term outcomes of the ability to delay gratification. Previous research demonstrates that individuals who are able to delay gratification have healthier relationships, have a better ability to cope with stressful situations and reach higher levels of education (Godoy et al. 2004; Kirby et al. 2002; Mischel, Shoda and Rodriguez 1989; Shoda, Mischel and Peake 1990a; Reyes-García et al. 2007). In contrast, a weaker ability to delay gratification has been found to be connected to addictions, earlier sexual debuts and unwanted pregnancy, problems with regulation of emotions and lower levels of academic performance (Ayduk et al. 2000; Bickel and Marsch 2001; Diller, Saunders and Anderson 2008; Gross 1998; Hoerger, Quirk and Weed 2011; Hanoch, Rolison and Gummerum 2013; Kirby, Petry and Bickel 1999b; Kirby, Winston and Santiesteban 2005; Arriaga and Rusbult 1998; Ayduk and Kross 2008). The results of these studies highlight the importance of understanding how different practices or interventions could improve the ability to delay gratification in children, enabling them to enjoy the benefits of controlling their immediate impulses and benefit from the positive socioeconomic outcomes associated with the ability to delay gratification. On the one hand, facilitating children’s delay ability would help to improve their future quality of life by being able to anticipate future consequences of their present behaviours. On the other hand, being able to improve someone’s ability to resist immediately available temptations for more advantageous, long-term alternatives may help treat various behavioural disorders, such as substance abuse, gambling and obesity.

Although there are some clinical studies that have addressed how clinical populations that have a lower ability to delay gratification (such as children with ADHD) can improve it with practice (Gawrilow, Gollwitzer and Oettingen 2011; Marco et al. 2009; e.g. Diamond and Lee 2011; Muraven and Baumeister 2000; Sonuga-Barke, Dalen and Remington 2003), there appears to be no research programme designed for improving the ability to delay gratification in typically developing populations or to understand what effect – if any – cultural practices such as ritual may have aided the development of the delay of gratification, and no research programme that I am aware of situates such research within the framework of evolutionary psychology.

The experimental work which is the basis for this book attempted to fill this gap by connecting an intervention designed for improving children’s higher-order cognitive abilities (more specifically, executive function – cognitive ability enabling us to control and regulate our behaviour) and their ability to delay gratification to ritual behaviours generally. In other words, the research presented here is not focused on improving the ability to delay gratification directly, rather it is argued that executive function and the ability to delay gratification are interconnected, and by improving executive function by participating in rituals, the ability to delay gratification also improves.

In this book, a novel contribution to our understanding of human behaviour is made by exploring the role of ritual in the development of executive function and the ability to delay gratification. Although ritual, executive function and the ability to delay gratification are all well-researched phenomena, this book outlines an approach that synthesizes the relationships between the three and situates this new understanding of how children develop this cognitive architecture within a cross-cultural evolutionary framework. In the chapters that follow, I argue that cognitive processes involved in the social learning of ritual, group-specific, conventional behaviours (themselves a relatively unexplored topic) make higher demands on cognitive processing than instru mental behaviours, which involve learning behaviours for which the natural causal outcome of the action is knowable. I argue that the reason for this is that ritual learning requires precise reproduction of modelled behaviours at the proper time, in the proper place, in the proper way in order to avoid negative feedback from a peer group (e.g. ridicule or ostracism). Although this effect of ritual has been explored in recent research (Watson-Jones et al. 2014), here I focus on how the desire to belong and avoid social threat affects the cognitive processes involved in self-control: namely attention, inhibitory control and working memory – cognitive processes united under the term ‘executive function’ (Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller 2010; Hofmann, Schmeichel and Baddeley 2012; Ponitz et al. 2009; Wanless et al. 2011) that appear necessary for the ability to delay gratification.

This book also seeks to bridge the gap between the executive function and the ability to delay gratification, and demonstrate how anthropological research into ritual can inform our understanding of human cognition. In the later chapters, I discuss research demonstrating that by improving an individual’s executive function abilities, participation in ritual behaviours leads to improvement of the ability to delay gratification.

The key original studies that inform this book stem from experimental research with schoolchildren attending the first and second grades of primary school – the period when the development of crucial cognitive abilities is essentially completed. This is because some studies suggest that before the age of four (the classical milestone where children develop the ability to understand what other people know, known as Theory of Mind), children only understand the content of representations, but not different forces and directions of speech acts (e.g. Perner 1991). Because different cultures might exhibit different sensitivity to ritual cues, two different field sites – Slovakia and Vanuatu – were included to explore the effects of ritual. This not only allows understanding ritual as a feature of human societies in general but also includes a more representative sample of participants.

1.2 How schooling connects rituals and the ability to delay gratification

Research has found that schooling is the most significant predictor of delayed gratification (Godoy et al. 2004; Kirby et al. 2002; Reyes-García et al. 2007). Interestingly, research shows that a single additional year of schooling correlates with a 11.2 to 11.6 per cent improvement in the ability to delay gratification (Godoy et al. 2004). To explain the relationship, some...