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The earliest more or less datable events in South Asia’s cultural history, the deathof the Buddha and the composition of Pāṇini’s grammar – respectively five andfour centuries before the beginning of the common era – antedate with one to twocenturies the start of a slow and hesitant shift from orality to the writtentransmission of sacred and literary texts in South Asia. Wit...

BACKGROUND This study focused on hypotheses regarding the source of incompleteness in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). For this, we had to document the behavioral manifestation of incompleteness in compulsive rituals, predicting that an exaggerated focus on acts that are appropriate for the task will support the hypothesis on heightened responsibility/perfectionism. In contrast, activity pa...

The mindless use of null-hypothesis significance testing – the significance test ritual (e.g., Salsburg, 1985) – has long been criticized. The main component of the ritual can be characterized as follows: Once you have collected your data, try to refute your null hypothesis (e.g., no mean difference, zero correlation, etc.) in an automatized manner. Often the ritual is complemented by the “star...

Purpose – This review aims to examine how photography and video have been used in a variety of fields. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines how these visual methods have and can be used in marketing. Findings – Photography and video have important strengths. They help us overcome the typically fleeting nature of observation. They also allow us to record behavior in its situational c...

In therapy, as in all human activity, drama is both inevitable and necessary. It is inevitable because, during the human life-cycle, people are constantly confronted with dramatic changes and it is necessary because all transitions occur as a result of more or less dramatic experiences-in-action. Thus, it is not surprising that drama has been used for centuries both within the theatre and in va...

Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 2...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kib...