Dimitris Xygalatas
Biographic Data
| ID | 100552 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dimitris Xygalatas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dimitris |
| FAMILY NAME | Xygalatas |
| SIGNATURE | XYGALATAS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Connecticut |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1561-9327 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 103 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Mark Roosien, ‘Ritual and Earthquakes in Constantinople: Liturgy, Ecology, and Empire’
Mark Roosien, Ritual and Earthquakes in Constantinople: Liturgy, Ecology, and Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 204 pp., ISBN: 9781009427265
The ritual stance affects perceptions of effort
Cognitive theories of ritual propose that ceremonial actions are processed through a distinct “ritual stance,” which emphasizes symbolic and social value over utilitarian demands. We tested whether this stance alters perceptions of costs and benefits by presenting 289 Hindu participants in Mauritius with vignettes describing identical activities—carrying, cooking, fasting, and walking—framed either in ritual or ordinary contexts. Participants rat…
Strengthening social networks and enhancing well-being through a collective Islamic ritual
Prediction Beyond Belief: Rituals as Active Inference Mechanisms
Studying Religion, Past and Present: Essays in Honor of Panayotis Pachis
Celebrating the contributions of Panayotis Pachis to the field, this book discusses the past, present, and future of the study of religion in antiquity and modernity.Panayotis Pachis has dedicated his celebrated career at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to the study of various aspects of ancient religions. The contents of this book reflect Pachis' conviction that the study of religious ideas and practices should be focused on three pilla…
Emotional contagion in a collective ritual
Collective gatherings are often associated with the alignment of psychophysiological states between members of a crowd. While the process of emotional contagion has been studied extensively in dyads as well as at the population level, our understanding of its operation and dynamics as they unfold in real time in real‐world group contexts remains limited. Employing a naturalistic design, we investigated emotional contagion in a public religious ri…
Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies
How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which religious beliefs and behaviors will be associated. To evaluate these criteria, we examine the conten…
Socioeconomic Variation in Motivations for Ritual Practice
This paper investigates socioeconomic variation in motivations for ritual practices among Mauritian Hindus. Using cultural domain analysis, we explore individuals’ reported reasons for engaging in a variety of religious rituals. Our findings demonstrate significant intra-cultural diversity driven by social stratification. Specifically, we observe that those of lower social standing appear primarily motivated by existential concerns related to mat…
The Ritual Spectrum: Definitions, Frameworks, and Implications: Response to Commentators
Ritual is one of the defining characteristics of our species, which both precedes and extends beyond religion, into domains like politics, sports, family, the workplace, and all manner of social organizations. In a rapidly changing world where organized religion appears to be losing its monopoly on ceremony, it is more important than ever to understand ritual’s unwavering persistence, investigate its functions, and explore its applications. The c…
Witchcraft, Envy, and Norm Enforcement in Mauritius
Recent research has shown that an array of religious beliefs can be used to enforce socially normative behaviour, but the application of these theories to other supernatural beliefs, including witchcraft, is still nascent. Across two pre-registered studies in Mauritius, we examine how witchcraft is believed to be caused by envy and how this belief can create and enforce social norms around not causing envy. Data was collected in-person in Mauriti…
Author's response: On the varieties of ritual studies
In this article, the author responds to review articles dedicated to the book "Ritual. How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living," published in 2022., featured in this issue of the e-rhizome journal
A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being
The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N=10,535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-…
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Extreme Rituals
Ritual behavior is a human universal. We know of no society, past or present, which does not have rituals, so much so that ritual might be seen as one of the defining characteristic of our species. This in itself is a great puzzle, because rituals can entail significant, even massive, expenditures of time and resources with no immediately apparent payoffs. Nowhere is this puzzle more pronounced than in the case of certain “extreme” rituals, which…
Ritual Form and Ritual Choice among Mauritian Hindus
People's motivations to partake in religious rituals often relate to external socio-cultural forces such as tradition, ancestry, and peer-pressure, or deep personal convictions centered around devotion, gratitude, or spiritual experience, among others. Simultaneously, however, devotees may also have pragmatic motivations for practicing rituals, such as the need for protection, wellbeing, or socializing, or may see those rituals as a means of fulf…
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: A cross-cultural investigation
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we con…
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: A cross-cultural test
There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute…
Cigarettes for the dead: Effects of sorcery beliefs on parochial prosociality in Mauritius
Research testing evolutionary models of religious morality shows that supernatural beliefs in moralizing gods positively affect prosociality. However, the effects of beliefs related to local supernatural agents have not been extensively explored. Drawing from a Mauritian Hindu sample, we investigated the effects of beliefs and practices related to two different types of local supernatural agents (spirits of the deceased unconcerned with morality)…
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
The Einstein effect provides global evidence for scientific source credibility effects and the influence of religiosity
People tend to evaluate information from reliable sources more favourably, but it is unclear exactly how perceivers’ worldviews interact with this source credibility effect. In a large and diverse cross-cultural sample (N = 10,195 from 24 countries), we presented participants with obscure, meaningless statements attributed to either a spiritual guru or a scientist. We found a robust global source credibility effect for scientific authorities, whi…
Ritual exegesis among Mauritian Hindus
Practitioners reflections on the purpose and meaning of ritual actions are often assumed to be limited, absent, or irrelevant. As a result, many anthropological analyses overlook or brush away native explanations. While it is true that ritual exegesis can often be scarce, the current paper rather focuses on some of the conditions that favor its presence and on exploring the diversity in its forms across different types of rituals. Specifically, w…
Go Wild, Not Weird
Reliance on convenience samples for psychological experiments has led to the oversampling of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations (Henrich et al. 2010a). Our analysis of academic articles from six leading psychology journals revealed a significantly lower but still very high percentage of studies from European and English-speaking nations (92%), compared to a decade ago (95%), largely due to more studies fro…
Social inequality and signaling in a costly ritual
Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the impact of socio-environmental factors on the quality of ritual signaling. We examined this impact in th…
Ritualization increases the perceived efficacy of instrumental actions
Outgroup threat and the emergence of cohesive groups: A cross-cultural examination
Evolutionary models and empirical evidence suggest that outgroup threat is one of the strongest factors inducing group cohesion; however, little is known about the process of forming such cohesive groups. We investigated how outgroup threat galvanizes individuals to affiliate with others to form engaged units that are willing to act on behalf of their in-group. A total of 864 participants from six countries were randomly assigned to an outgroup t…
Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions
We explore the cognitive effects of three common features of religious interactions: (1) demand for the expressive suppression of emotion; (2) exposure to goal-demoted and causally opaque actions; and (3) the presence of a charismatic authority. Using a cognitive resource model of executive function, we argue that these three features affect the executive system in ways that limit the capacity for individual processing of religious events. We fra…
Global evidence of extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists
Autobiographical Memory in a Fire-Walking Ritual
Anthropological theories have discussed the effects of participation in high-arousal rituals in the formation of autobiographical memory; however, precise measurements for such effects are lacking. In this study, we examined episodic recall among participants in a highly arousing fire-walking ritual. To assess arousal, we used heart rate measurements. To assess the dynamics of episodic memories, we obtained reports immediately after the event and…
Effects of Extreme Ritual Practices on Psychophysiological Well-Being
Extreme ritual practices involving pain and suffering pose significant risks such as injury, trauma, or infection. Nonetheless, they are performed by millions of people around the world and are often culturally prescribed remedies for a variety of maladies, and especially those related to mental health. What is the actual impact of these practices on health? Combining ethnographic observations and psychophysiological monitoring, we investigated o…
Ritual exegesis among Mauritian Hindus
Practitioners reflections on the purpose and meaning of ritual actions are often assumed to be limited, absent, or irrelevant. As a result, many anthropological analyses overlook or brush away native explanations. While it is true that ritual exegesis can often be scarce, the current paper rather focuses on some of the conditions that favor its presence and on exploring the diversity in its forms across different types of rituals. Specifically, w…
Location, Location, Location: Effects of Cross-Religious Primes on Prosocial Behavior
Priming with religious concepts is known to have a positive effect on prosocial behavior; however, the effects of religious primes associated with outgroups remain unknown. To explore this, we conducted a field experiment in a multicultural, multireligious setting (the island of Mauritius). Our design used naturally occurring, ecologically relevant contextual primes pertinent to everyday religious and secular life while maintaining full experimen…
The Einstein effect provides global evidence for scientific source credibility effects and the influence of religiosity
People tend to evaluate information from reliable sources more favourably, but it is unclear exactly how perceivers’ worldviews interact with this source credibility effect. In a large and diverse cross-cultural sample (N = 10,195 from 24 countries), we presented participants with obscure, meaningless statements attributed to either a spiritual guru or a scientist. We found a robust global source credibility effect for scientific authorities, whi…
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
Extreme Rituals as Social Technologies
We often think of pain as intrinsically bad, and the avoidance of pain is a fundamental evolutionary drive of all species. How can we then explain widespread cultural practices like certain rituals that involve the voluntary infliction of physical pain? In this paper, we argue that inflicting and experiencing pain in a ritual setting may serve important psychological and social functions. By providing psychological relief and leading to stronger …
Outgroup threat and the emergence of cohesive groups: A cross-cultural examination
Evolutionary models and empirical evidence suggest that outgroup threat is one of the strongest factors inducing group cohesion; however, little is known about the process of forming such cohesive groups. We investigated how outgroup threat galvanizes individuals to affiliate with others to form engaged units that are willing to act on behalf of their in-group. A total of 864 participants from six countries were randomly assigned to an outgroup t…
Ethnography, Historiography, and the Making of History in the Tradition of the Anastenaria
In five villages of Northern Greece, the communities of the Anastenaria have a long tradi- tion of fire-walking rituals. The Anastenaria are Orthodox Christians, and their rituals are performed in honour of saints Constantine and Helen. However, the majority of Greek scholars have argued that these rituals originate from the ancient orgiastic cults of Dionysus. This theory was intentionally designed to serve specific political agendas, namely to …
Prediction Beyond Belief: Rituals as Active Inference Mechanisms
Witchcraft, Envy, and Norm Enforcement in Mauritius
Recent research has shown that an array of religious beliefs can be used to enforce socially normative behaviour, but the application of these theories to other supernatural beliefs, including witchcraft, is still nascent. Across two pre-registered studies in Mauritius, we examine how witchcraft is believed to be caused by envy and how this belief can create and enforce social norms around not causing envy. Data was collected in-person in Mauriti…
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Nickolas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (2009), Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives, Little, Brown, New York, NY. 353 pages
"Nickolas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (2009), Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives, Little, Brown, New York, NY. 353 pages." published on 01 Jan 2010 by Brill
Synchronized arousal between performers and related spectators in a fire-walking ritual
Collective rituals are present in all known societies, but their function is a matter of long-standing debates. Field observations suggest that they may enhance social cohesion and that their effects are not limited to those actively performing but affect the audience as well. Here we show physiological effects of synchronized arousal in a Spanish fire-walking ritual, between active participants and related spectators, but not participants and ot…
Ethnography, Historiography, and the Making of History in the Tradition of the Anastenaria
In five villages of Northern Greece, the communities of the Anastenaria have a long tradi- tion of fire-walking rituals. The Anastenaria are Orthodox Christians, and their rituals are performed in honour of saints Constantine and Helen. However, the majority of Greek scholars have argued that these rituals originate from the ancient orgiastic cults of Dionysus. This theory was intentionally designed to serve specific political agendas, namely to …
Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion
1. Introduction: Social Minds, Mental Cultures: Weaving Together Cognition and Culture in the Study of Religion, Dimitris Xygalatas and William W. McCorkle Jr. 2. Explanatory Pluralism and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Why Scholars in Religious Studies Should Stop Worrying about Reductionism, Robert McCauley 3. Early Cognitive Theorists of Religion: Robin Horton and his Predecessors, Stewart Guthrie 4. The Opium or the Aphrodisiac of the Peo…
Extreme Rituals Promote Prosociality
Extreme rituals entail excessive costs without apparent benefits, which raises an evolutionary cost problem (Irons, 2001). It is argued that such intense rituals enhance social cohesion and promote cooperative behaviors (Atran & Henrich, 2010; Durkheim, 1912). However, direct evidence for the relation between ritual intensity and prosociality is lacking. Using economic measures of generosity and contextually relevant indicators of group identity …
Effects of religious setting on cooperative behavior: A case study from Mauritius
Social scientists and folk wisdom have both claimed that there is an association between religiosity and prosocial behavior, but hard evidence for such a relationship is limited. Studies show that religiosity is correlated with self-reported prosociality; however, this relationship is not very clear when it comes to observed prosocial behaviors. Experimental studies reveal a link between religious priming and prosocial behaviors, and these effect…
The resource model and the principle of predictive coding: A framework for analyzing proximate effects of ritual
What is natural and unnatural about religion and science
Judging by its title, unsuspecting readers, unfamiliar with the scientific study of religion, might expect Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not to be advancing some creationist argument.If anyone bought this book based on that expectation, they would be disappointed.Instead, McCauley's book offers, among other things, one of creationists' greatest anathemas: a naturalistic account of religion.However, its primary goal is not to explain reli…
Autobiographical Memory in a Fire-Walking Ritual
Anthropological theories have discussed the effects of participation in high-arousal rituals in the formation of autobiographical memory; however, precise measurements for such effects are lacking. In this study, we examined episodic recall among participants in a highly arousing fire-walking ritual. To assess arousal, we used heart rate measurements. To assess the dynamics of episodic memories, we obtained reports immediately after the event and…
Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions
We explore the cognitive effects of three common features of religious interactions: (1) demand for the expressive suppression of emotion; (2) exposure to goal-demoted and causally opaque actions; and (3) the presence of a charismatic authority. Using a cognitive resource model of executive function, we argue that these three features affect the executive system in ways that limit the capacity for individual processing of religious events. We fra…
Extreme Rituals as Social Technologies
We often think of pain as intrinsically bad, and the avoidance of pain is a fundamental evolutionary drive of all species. How can we then explain widespread cultural practices like certain rituals that involve the voluntary infliction of physical pain? In this paper, we argue that inflicting and experiencing pain in a ritual setting may serve important psychological and social functions. By providing psychological relief and leading to stronger …
Biosocial Basis of Collective Effervescence: An experimental anthropological study of a fire-walking ritual
Collective rituals have long been assumed to play a role in increasing social assimilation and forging emotional bonds between group members. Émile Durkheim described a feeling of belonging and emotional alignment produced by ritual participation, which he called “collective effervescence”. Although this notion has informed generations of anthropologists, it has been notoriously difficult to quantify, while little is known about the physiological…
Location, Location, Location: Effects of Cross-Religious Primes on Prosocial Behavior
Priming with religious concepts is known to have a positive effect on prosocial behavior; however, the effects of religious primes associated with outgroups remain unknown. To explore this, we conducted a field experiment in a multicultural, multireligious setting (the island of Mauritius). Our design used naturally occurring, ecologically relevant contextual primes pertinent to everyday religious and secular life while maintaining full experimen…
Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality
Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists. How has cooperation persisted in human societies that are increasingly large and complex, where simple relatedness is not necessarily sufficient? These authors examin…
Global evidence of extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists
The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior
The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework
Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical work…
Big Gods in small places: The Random Allocation Game in Mauritius
The relationship between religion and social behavior has been the subject of longstanding debates. Recent evolutionary models of religious morality propose that particular types of supernatural beliefs related to moralizing and punitive high gods will have observable effects on prosociality. We tested this hypothesis, comparing the effects of diverse religious beliefs, practices, and contexts among Hindus in Mauritius. We found that specific asp…
The evolution of religion and morality: A synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies
Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both cer…
Author Correction: Global evidence of extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists
Effects of Extreme Ritual Practices on Psychophysiological Well-Being
Extreme ritual practices involving pain and suffering pose significant risks such as injury, trauma, or infection. Nonetheless, they are performed by millions of people around the world and are often culturally prescribed remedies for a variety of maladies, and especially those related to mental health. What is the actual impact of these practices on health? Combining ethnographic observations and psychophysiological monitoring, we investigated o…
Go Wild, Not Weird
Reliance on convenience samples for psychological experiments has led to the oversampling of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations (Henrich et al. 2010a). Our analysis of academic articles from six leading psychology journals revealed a significantly lower but still very high percentage of studies from European and English-speaking nations (92%), compared to a decade ago (95%), largely due to more studies fro…
Social inequality and signaling in a costly ritual
Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the impact of socio-environmental factors on the quality of ritual signaling. We examined this impact in th…
Ritualization increases the perceived efficacy of instrumental actions
Outgroup threat and the emergence of cohesive groups: A cross-cultural examination
Evolutionary models and empirical evidence suggest that outgroup threat is one of the strongest factors inducing group cohesion; however, little is known about the process of forming such cohesive groups. We investigated how outgroup threat galvanizes individuals to affiliate with others to form engaged units that are willing to act on behalf of their in-group. A total of 864 participants from six countries were randomly assigned to an outgroup t…
Psychology (31 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (23 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (21 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Political science (11 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Law (9 works)