They serve various purposes: promoting social solidarity by expressing shared values, facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge and regulating emotions.
Niko Tinbergen expanded the concept of ritualization in his 1951 paper "The Study of Instinct," in which he described how certain animal behaviors, such as courtship and aggression, become more effective forms of communication through a gradual process of selection and refinement.
Victor Turner emphasized the symbolic and cultural aspects of ritual, while Randall Collins explored its psychological and emotional dimensions.
These studies have resolved the origins, functions, and effects of ritual behavior and opened up new ways for understanding its role in human society and culture.
Ritualization is a behavior that occurs typically in a member of a given species in a highly stereotyped fashion and independent of any direct physiological significance.
Konrad Lorenz, working with greylag geese and other animals such as water shrews, showed that ritualization was an important process in their development.
They offer a context for processing complex emotions, such as grief, joy, or gratitude, and can help people cope with significant life events, transitions, or loss.
In Durkheim's famous writing “The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912)”, he theorized the distinction between traditional and modern societies in terms of social solidarity.
He emphasizes the importance of “communitas,” a state of social unity and cohesion that emerges during rituals or other shared experiences, transcending the ordinary divisions and hierarchies within society.
In Collins’ paper, he builds upon Durkheim's ideas and proposes that rituals generate emotional energy, which in turn fosters social solidarity.
Boyer, Liénard, and McCorkle argue that ritualized compulsions are in relation to an evolved cognitive architecture where social, cultural, and environmental selection pressures stimulate "hazard-precaution" systems such as predation, contagion, and disgust in human minds.