In our new paper, we aim to reconcile individual and group motivations for ritual performance and persistence through reinforcement learning.
There are illustrations in the paper. I got to draw them! See Martin's post for deeper explanation and also for the link to free copies of the article!
This paper is part of a broader project on signaler psychology — exploring the cognitive computations behind human cooperative communication.
đź”— Project page: www.levyna.cz/en/research/...
We expand costly signalling theory (of religion) from the participants’ perspective, showing that what drives ritual commitment isn’t just how people judge the costs, but how they perceive the benefits—including supernatural ones.