Rituals or Good Works: Social Signalling in Religious Organizations

We develop a model of social signalling of religiosity and cooperative behaviour in religious organizations. The model embeds a ritual-based religious organization in which signalling arises through the use of costly rituals, and a discipline-based religious organization in which such signalling occurs through the monitoring of past behaviour. We use this framework to contrast -positively and normativelythese two forms of social signalling. We show that ritual-based religions, while using a costly and wasteful signal, also imply a higher level of coordination of behaviour in social interactions and a higher incidence of mutual cooperation. Our welfare analysis suggests that communities are more likely to support a switch to a discipline-based religion if strategic complementarities are high, and if there is suffi ciently high level of public information about social behaviour. This accords with the success of Calvin’s Reformation in Switzerland and France, a process characterized by the reduction of rituals along with the creation of institutions to monitor and publicise individuals’behaviour, such as the Consistory. We thank the editor and three anonymous referees for their comments. We also thank the ERC for financial support (grant no 210385).