Welcome to our mid-week randomness on The Zen Pagan. (A little behind schedule this week, but, well, it\u2019s random!) Bringing you three interesting things before the weekend.<\/p>\n
NPR reports on recent research into the sociological impact of rituals<\/a>. The researchers created arbitrary simple rituals and investigated how those rituals affected trust in a game involving sharing money:<\/p>\n \u2026Hobson and the other researchers find that complex rituals change how people interact with one another, especially when it comes to the amount of trust they repose in others. The researchers had volunteers play a game, for example, where they could share money with a partner, but they didn\u2019t know whether the partner in turn would share money back with them.<\/p>\n \u2026Those participants who did do the ritual over the course of the week gave more money or they entrusted more of their own money to fellow ingroup members with whom they shared this arbitrary, minimal ritual. And they actually ended up entrusting less money to their outgroup members with whom they didn\u2019t share this ritual.<\/p>\n \u2026If you can get people to do a complicated ritual and have them do it over a repeated period of days, it turns out that this can increase trust and cooperation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So rituals can increase social cohesion \u2014 great, right? But of course there\u2019s a flip side:<\/p>\n Of course, this research is also pointing to the downside of rituals, which is that even when they\u2019re completely meaningless and made up they can cause us to distrust people from groups that do not share the same ritual.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Speaking of ritual, this popped up on Twitter: a sign at a Catholic Church<\/a> about rules for confession. It reads \u201cConfession today (Saturday) will be until exactly 5:30PM. There is only one priest available for confession today. Make your confession direct and to the point and confess only your sins and offenses. No need to explain why you did it. Thank you very much.\u201d (A little Google-fu shows this has been bouncing around the net for at least a year. but it\u2019s new to me.)<\/p>\n On a lighter note, this sign, spotted at a Catholic Church, reads like a passive-aggressive flatmate angry with people using up the milk. pic.twitter.com\/E4687eQBJs<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Alex Andreou (@sturdyAlex) March 29, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAssembly-Line Confession<\/h2>\n
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