Secular rituals might play a similar role to religious ones in fostering feelings of social connection and boosting positive affect

Charles SJ, van Mulukom V, Brown JE, Watts F, Dunbar RIM, Farias M (2021) United on Sunday: The effects of secular rituals on social bonding and affect. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0242546. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242546

Rolf Degen's take: "A secular collective Sunday-ritual fostered social bonding and positive affect to the same degree as its Christian equivalent. https://t.co/EsWZdqQKrA https://t.co/aIAJlJBFCf"

Abstract: Religious rituals are associated with health benefits, potentially produced via social bonding. It is unknown whether secular rituals similarly increase social bonding. We conducted a field study with individuals who celebrate secular rituals at Sunday Assemblies and compared them with participants attending Christian rituals. We assessed levels of social bonding and affect before and after the rituals. Results showed the increase in social bonding taking place in secular rituals is comparable to religious rituals. We also found that both sets of rituals increased positive affect and decreased negative affect, and that the change in positive affect predicted the change in social bonding observed. Together these results suggest that secular rituals might play a similar role to religious ones in fostering feelings of social connection and boosting positive affect.

Discussion

Religious rituals occur in all human societies [77], and they seem to confer various benefits to those who take part [1]. It has been suggested that rituals are evolutionarily adaptive by helping foster social bonds [16]. This hypothesis has received some support from field research on religious rituals [30] and from a large body of research showing social bonds provide health benefits [39–41]. It has also been proposed that attending secular rituals, such as Sunday Assembly meetings, may lead to improved wellbeing (e.g. [53]). However, whether the social bonding effect reported from religious rituals is also seen in secular rituals that mimic the behaviours of religious rituals had not been tested before. This study of participants from Sunday Assemblies provides the first evidence that the fostering of social bonds occurs in a secular ritual setting. We compared this to a matched group of individuals from four Christian churches. The results showed that social bonding improvements are of a similar level at both Sunday Assembly and religious ritual settings.

Follow-up analyses found that the increase in social bonding from before to after the Sunday Assemblies was positively predicted by the change in positive affect, as has been found for churches across the UK [30], but not negative affect. These findings are in line with the ‘broaden and build’ hypothesis, which suggests that positive emotions increase the scope of one’s attention to others to allow for the formation of social connections, which themselves lead to improved mental wellbeing [19, 34, 35]. This hypothesis has also been used to suggest that link between religion and wellbeing stems from changes in positive affect [34, 35], which in turn leads to protective social benefits, such as social support [36].

Stepwise regression analysis found that neither level of spirituality nor level of religiosity played a significant role in social bonding change, despite both variables having been related to wellbeing in the past [78]. This could be the result of the methodology of previous studies, which have often used attendance of religious services as a measure for religiosity itself [1, 79], which could conflate the effect of ritual attendance with religiosity and/or spirituality. Diener and colleagues [36] have noted that the reported relationship between religiosity and wellbeing is conditional on social support and social structure. This may explain why religiosity did not directly predict social bonding change in either Sunday Assembly or church participants. Price and Launay [53] have specifically suggested that future research should account for the length of time one had been attending Sunday Assembly, to see if this could explain the wellbeing effects they reported. In the stepwise regression model, the length of attendance did not add predictive value for the change in social bonding in the Sunday Assembly participants. If, as Price and Launay [53] suggest, the improved wellbeing stems from social bonding, this may suggest that protective effects of participating in secular ritual could occur quickly. We must note, though, that we likely failed to detect this effect for Sunday Assembly participants because there were a number of people attending the ritual for the first time in the Sunday Assembly population, which was not the case with the Christian church participants, for whom we found that length of attendance predicted strength of social bonding. Future research should attempt to account for the effect of newcomers on social bonding during group rituals.

This work is the first to demonstrate that secular rituals, much like religious rituals, promote feelings of social bonding. However, we acknowledge that there are limitations to this study. Firstly, this study was not pre-registered. Given the changes suggested by those promoting Open Science methodologies since the advent of the replication crisis [80–82], the methods and analysis plans could have been registered in advance of conducting the study. Though pre-registration was not done in this case, the full anonymised dataset and the research materials are provided in supplementary materials in accordance with other Open Science practices, and a power analysis was provided to support the sample size used in this study.

Another limitation is that we only conducted research with one type of secular ritual, the Sunday Assembly meetings. Sunday Assembly meetings are not the only secular ritual that mimic religious ritual, with other examples including the Church of Positivism [50]–still active in Brazil–and the Religious Humanism movement in the United States.

One avenue for future research is to conduct studies investigating whether the positive health effects found in those who regularly attend religious rituals can also be seen in those who regularly attend Sunday Assemblies or other similar non-religious rituals that mimic the behaviours of religious rituals, compared to those who do not attend such rituals. Examples of such positive health effects are better immune function and lowering levels of all-cause mortality [3–6], depression [7–9, 83, 84] and suicidality [1]. Here, we have examined the role of ritual on social bonding. However, to better understand the mechanisms underlying the protective factors that have previously been related only to religious participation, future research could compare health outcomes from those who attend secular rituals to those who do not, while taking affect and social bonding into account. We also recommend that, much like in our research, social bonding factors be explicitly measured in future ritual and health research, as this may provide a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanism by which ritual attendance appears to improve wellbeing.

Future research can also look more widely at gatherings of secular groups, which are not intentionally ‘rituals’ but nonetheless may create a sense of connection to something bigger than oneself. A variety of gatherings may function as a form of ‘implicit religion’ [85–87], such as sporting events where one feels connected to a team spirit [88, 89], thus creating social bonds in ways similar to religious rituals. Conducting research in such settings would allow us to better understand the nature and effects of ritual-like social bonding in secular contexts.