Feb 04 2009
How Group Rituals Can Be Valuable
As described in the article, Marching To The Beat Of The Same Drummer Improves Teamwork, researchers at Stanford performed a couple of ingenious experiments, including this one -
In the second experiment, volunteers listened to music via headphones and had to move cups back and forth in time to the music. The volunteers were divided into different groups, so that some of the groups listened to the same music and thus moved their cups in a synchronous manner. In the other groups, the volunteers listened to music at different tempos, so their movements were not synchronized. This was again followed by an economics game where more cooperation would result in larger payoff. This final game was designed so that players could put tokens in a public account, or keep the tokens for themselves.
And what did they find?
[W]hen people engage in synchronous activity together, they become more likely to cooperate with other group members.
Therein probably resides one of the strengths and benefits (to in-group members) of religious involvement: it fosters a greater sense of community and cooperation. While the “love thy neighbor” teachings may play a role — they also may not, it hasn’t been established (as far as I know) — the singing and group praying and simple sitting and standing on cue likely does.
Interesting.
