Can participating repeatedly in rigidly constrained, pointless actions enhance traits relevant to character development?
and morality are connected is widespread. Presumably, it is based on the inference that belief in a morally interested deity, who knows everything about people’s thoughts and actions, will spur believers to conduct themselves uprightly. They might be prompted to do so in light of their expectations about
or they may simply be motivated by less mercenary religious devotion. This account of the connection between religions and morality focuses on people’s distinctively religiousA question arises, however, about possible connections between morality or at least what we would regard as the.
Ritual performances, let alone mindless routines, hardly seem likely candidates for instilling virtues or fortifying humans’ moral convictions, especially when, on the face of it, the rituals in question have nothing to do with such matters. Assuming that measures of changes in morally relevant dispositions are feasible, the question lends itself to empirical investigation.Harvey Whitehouse explores this question.
Then the 100 from each country were divided into three groups: a ritual group, an instrumental group, and a control group. Twice per week for 30-45 minutes for the next three months, the ritual and instrumental groups participated in “circle games.” In the ritual condition, experimentersthe importance of rule-following and told the children “it has always been done this way.
At the end of the three months, all of the children were retested in the same three capacities. Crucially, Whitehouse, Rybanska, and their colleagues got the same findings with the children from both countries, suggesting that major cultural differences had little or no effect. Incountries, the control group children had progressed the least. The children in the instrumental condition did a good deal better, but the children in the ritual condition improved most of all.
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