The Psychological Foundations of Ritual Learning

ritual is a universal feature of human culture. A decade of psychological research provides new insight into the early emerging propensity for ritual learning. Children learn the ritual practices and instrumental skills of their communities by observing and imitating trusted group members such as adults and peers. They use social and contextual cues to determine when an action is an instrumental skill versus a ritual, and they modify their behavior accordingly. When behavior is interpreted as a ritual, children imitate with higher fidelity, engage in less innovation, are more accurate when detecting differences, and display more functional fixedness than when behavior is interpreted as instrumental. Children and adults also transmit ritual behavior to others with higher fidelity than they do instrumental behavior. The authors propose that affiliation with social groups motivates imitative fidelity of ritual. Species-specific social learning mechanisms facilitate the transmission of instrumental skills as well as rituals intergenerationally and enable cumulative cultural learning.

Geir Sigurđsson: Confucian Propriety and Ritual Learning

Even though the book was published more than three years ago, it is still quite topical and unsurpassed. The Outstanding Book Award, which was presented to it last year by the Society of Professors of Education, was therefore well deserved and not surprising. In this work, Geir Sigurđsson reconstructs the meaning, the role and the manifold significance of the Confucian rituality by considering the spatial and temporal context of the present situation. This does not only mean that he wants to elaborate upon the question of what can Confucian rituality “still” offer to the present humankind, and to select those elements of this rich classical tradition that could prove themselves to be most “useful” and “worthwhile” for such endeavors. It rather means that the author aims to offer the readers his own, often quite topical philosophical insights created upon the inspirational foundations of classical Confucian texts. In this context, he proposes a reconsideration of the notion Li, which belongs to the most controversial concepts in the Confucian thought.