CESR and Scientific Approaches to Religious Experience

The CESR standard model of religion posits that religious beliefs and practices hinge on culturally improvised concepts in domains that are the targets of species‐typical cognitive biases, such as folk psychology and anthropomorphism (Guthrie ; Atran ; Powell and Clarke ; Jong ). Myths that evoke but minimally violate these biases are thought to disproportionately spread due to their heightened cognitive salience (Atran and Henrich ; cf. Purzycki and Willard ). Some recent versions of this model have suggested that rituals aim at confirmatory bias: myths that may be rooted in cognitive biases in turn cause people to seek out experiences that leverage those very biases to corroborate the myths (Van Leeuwen and van Elk ; cf. Luhrmann ). Iterations of the standard model have additionally become the foundation and sometime foil for broader programs that investigate the social and group‐level effects of religious beliefs and practices on cooperation (Atran and Henrich ; Norenzayan et al. ; Purzycki et al. ) and study the functions and cognitive foundations of ritual as a signaling system (Irons ; Sosis ; Xygalatas et al. ; Power ); a byproduct of intrinsic drives for predictability and threat avoidance (Boyer and Liénard ); or the consequence of innate tendencies to imitate conventional actions (Kapitány and Nielsen ).

By contrast, CESR has no equivalently accepted framework for interpreting or investigating religious ASCs that could produce commensurable models for producing testable hypotheses. Antistructural moments, such as initiation rites, are ubiquitously featured in religions the world over (Olaveson ; Van Gennep ), yet CESR largely has not addressed antistructural phenomena, for example, in its attempts to “fractionate” the folk category of religion into discrete, scientifically tractable constituents (McKay and Whitehouse ). Instead, treatments of antistructure have been largely limited to (1) theories of divergent modes or forms of ritual (Whitehouse ; McCauley and Lawson ), which describe ecstatic versus formalized rites in terms of attractor positions in the landscape of cultural possibility; and (2) empirical investigations of rhythmic motor synchrony, such as collective drumming or dancing—particularly its effects on social bonding (Mogan, Fischer, and Bulbulia ). Neither of these research programs treats ritual primarily in terms of the negotiation of social structure, in contradistinction to most ritual theory (Smith ; Bell [1992] ). Empirical studies of synchrony or rhythmic dance, for example, have emphasized rhythmic synchrony's effects on direct interpersonal bonding, not how it impacts participants’ social‐structural roles (although see Lang et al. ; Wood, Caldwell‐Harris, and Stopa ). CESR has thus tended to overlook what Turner called the “ritual process.”

CESR researchers instead often approach religious ASCs (or religious experience more broadly) using de novo frameworks that define their targets in varying ways. McNamara () offered an important neurological model of religious experience that emphasizes the “decentering” or temporary deactivation of self‐relevant executive cognitive functions. However, this theory encompasses ordinary experiences of routinized religious ritual as well as ecstatic practices, and so is not a theory of religious ASCs specifically (e.g., McNamara , 219). By contrast, Wildman () described a biocultural basis for “intense experiences” distinct from ordinary perceptual and cognitive states that also decenter the self and which evolutionarily postdate human behavioral modernity. Wildman's approach does not heavily emphasize the social or conventional dimensions of ritual, but instead offers an interdisciplinary philosophical account of the epistemic and existential affordances of such experiences. Richly informative for distinct purposes, these frameworks do not define their target phenomena in commensurate ways, and neither schema links the capacity for intense or religious experiences directly to symbolic language or collective intentionality—strong candidates for the most distinctive of behaviorally modern human traits (Deacon ; Bloch ; Tomasello ).

Similarly, Whitehouse's (, ) theory of divergent religious modes addresses aspects of religious experience, but primarily aims to identify complementary mechanisms for social bonding. Specifically, expressive or “imagistic” forms of ritual—associated with religious ASCs—are described as grounded in episodic memory encoding, while routinized or “doctrinal” rituals recruit semantic memory. Social bonding is described mostly in terms of affective commitments or group identification, not conventional obligations that enable reliable prediction of behavior (cf. Tomasello ). The theory thus sits somewhat in tension with an increasing focus within human evolutionary biology on differentiated social structure (Smaldino ; Tomasello ).

Other attempts to address ASCs in cognitive and evolutionary terms have left unintegrated different levels of scientific analysis. Newberg and D'Aquili's well‐known neuroimaging studies of meditative and absorptive states (e.g., Newberg, D'Aquili, and Rause ; Newberg et al. ) have illuminated important aspects of the neurological bases for religious ASCs, but they largely lack social‐scientific interpretation that could place their findings in the context of social dynamics or feedback relationships between individuals and groups (cf. Wildman ). An important exception is Taves and Asprem's () treatment of religious experience using an event cognition framework that emphasizes the segmentation of basic temporal units of experience. Taves and Asprem's framework hinges on a predictive coding model in which the brain operates as a Bayesian inference machine for updating predictive models of the world. “Events” are identified with spikes in prediction error when environmental stimuli are unexpected. Under this rubric, unusual experiences may result, for example, when unexpected bottom‐up perceptual input receives a culturally informed top‐down interpretation (cf. Schjødt and Andersen ; van Elk and Aleman ). Like McNamara (), Taves and Asprem do not focus exclusively on religious ASCs, but instead are interested in all forms of religious experience from normal petitionary prayer to out‐of‐body experiences (OBEs). However, their framework demonstrates the promise of a predictive coding model of brain function for unifying discrete levels of analysis in CESR. In what follows, I will refer to predictive coding models to map the relationship between religious ASCs and conventional affordances, specifically suggesting that one criterial trait of religious ASCs is a reduced emphasis on social prediction.

Religion as “Culture”

In a neo‐Durkheimian processual framework, “religion” and “culture” both impose roles and norms, establish collective identities, and depend on ritual to transform conventional or arbitrary states of affairs into seemingly “natural” ones (Douglas [] 1996; Rappaport ; Taves, Asprem, and Ihm ). In other words, both religion and culture are equivalent catchall terms for the myriad ways human collectives establish—and lead agents to internalize—institutional reality and conventional affordances (Bloch ; Ramstead, Veissière, and Kirmayer ; Wood and Shaver ). Below, I will draw on several research lines in cognitive anthropology and the philosophy of institutions to establish an analytic framework for investigating social institutions, conventional affordances, and the normative social roles that come along with them. This will lead to a discussion of specific features of ritual—particularly its nonpragmatic, repetitive, stereotyped, conventionalized, and formalized character (Goody ; Rappaport ; Kapitány and Nielsen ; Lang et al. ; Legare and Nielsen ). I will argue that ritualization is necessary to establish meta‐represented or socially subjunctive propositions (Sperber ; Boyer and Bergstrom ; Seligman et al. ). Both religious beliefs and institutional are examples of meta‐represented propositions: their contents are not straightforward factual beliefs, but are buffered within cognitive frames that limit their range of applicability (Bulbulia ; Van Leeuwen ; Wood and Shaver ).

In my account, social structure is constituted by meta‐represented institutional facts, such as “Jung Min is Mr. Kim's daughter‐in‐law.” In many cultures, religious norms and transcendental social structure are deeply integrated (Luckmann ; Bloch ). But transcendental social structure is not all there is to social or cognitive life. Jung Min may be a daughter‐in‐law, but she is also a unique agent. Sometimes her structural role aids her personal goals, sometimes not. In times of crisis, structure may need to be renegotiated and new institutional equilibria identified. Grievances may need to be redressed that have no formal institutional channel for expression (Lewis ). This is often where antistructure and religious ASCs come in. These experiences are typically characterized by relaxation of cultural schemas and, I argue, a redirection of agents’ focus toward data whose sources are objective or physiological, not cultural. Ecstatic rhythmic dance, as in shamanic or possession‐cult rites, provides a paradigmatic case of the ways in which this antistructural transition can stimulate ASCs. Below, a brief discussion of the neurocognitive dynamics of rhythmic social synchrony will help make this case.

This framework is capable of making sense of several important, cross‐culturally recurring features of profound religious experiences—particularly their apparent undeniability (James [1902] 1982), their association with gross physiological states (Bakhtin [1984] 2009), and their susceptibility to manipulative interventions such as drug use or rhythmic music (Olaveson ). It also points the way to a rigorous framework for understanding how large‐scale religious phenomena such as outbreaks of iconoclasm or eras of ideological antiritualism might emerge from the social‐cognitive processes of individual minds (Douglas [] 1996; Seligman et al. ). By taking a processual view of ritual as toggling back and forth between (1) ritualized social constructions, such as institutional facts or conventional affordances, and (2) objective stimuli or states of affairs, we can expand the range of CESR analyses to include domains of religious phenomena that have typically been overlooked in, or left unintegrated with, the bulk of explanatory research in religion.

Meta‐Representation and Religion

This pivotal role of language means that status functions or transcendental social roles are what Sperber () calls reflective beliefs. They are meta‐represented, or embedded within a cognitive frame that insulates them from normal inferential processes and includes “commentary” about their validity (Boyer and Bergstrom ). Unlike intuitive beliefs, meta‐represented beliefs are not taken directly at face value. The intuitive belief “it is raining” is mandatorily fixated when we get wet while standing outside, and leads directly to logical actions like opening an umbrella. But when we hear the weather reporter say “It is going to rain tomorrow at 7 pm,” we do not automatically accept that proposition as a fact and cancel the following day's afternoon plans. What we factually believe (Van Leeuwen ) is instead the meta‐represented proposition “The claim ‘It's going to rain tomorrow at 7 pm’ was [made by the weather reporter].” In other words, we only entertain the idea that it might rain within a limited cognitive frame, to consider what actions it might call for if true.

My claim is that meta‐representation is necessary for conventional affordances. Again, status functions and transcendental roles are not straightforwardly visible constituents of the physical world. At some level, when we represent an institutional claim like “a wedding requires an officiant,” we are actually embedding it within a meta‐representational frame (Leslie ; Bateson ), tagging it mentally as [legitimate; claimed to be true by government authorities; and so on]. The same is true, then, of propositions about transcendental roles, such as “Mr. Kim is now Jung Min's father‐in‐law.” Transcendental social structures are built on meta‐represented statements about people's roles. They enable the prediction of normative behavior by referencing information about the relevant social frame: we predict that Jung Min will turn her head away to drink because she is Mr. Kim's daughter‐in‐law within the frame KOREAN FAMILY.

Boyer and Bergstrom () argue that religious beliefs are also a kind of meta‐represented or reflective belief. For example, the reflective belief “Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets [is declared to be true in the Holy Quran]” is valid for predicting people's behavior within the frame ISLAM. This cognitive equivalence between institutional and religious propositions is why Bloch claims that, ethnologically speaking, the domain of transcendental social roles is the domain of “religion.” Consider that, in many societies, the rituals used to venerate the ancestors or the gods are identical to those used to defer to social superiors (cf. Whitehouse ; Bloch ). That is, how people treat kings bears significant resemblance to how people treat deities, and indeed in many contexts monarchs are literally considered gods (Bellah ; Graeber and Sahlins ). To operate within the transcendental social structure, one needs to treat its inhabitants—whether humans or spirits—according to the proper protocols, such as ritualized deference. Notably, such obligations often have little to do with how one would prefer to behave, all things being equal (Wood and Shaver ).

Efficient and Semiotic Causation in Homo Duplex

We can thus think of institutional facts within social frames—including transcendental social roles—as defined by desire‐independent motives for action (Searle ). If your Korean father‐in‐law dies, you have to attend his funeral in mourning garb, even if you'd really rather not. This does not mean people always actually fulfill their transcendental role obligations—obviously, they often do not (Brown ). But when they do not, the legitimacy of their roles comes into question. If someone fails to act like an X, then soon other people will not treat him or her as an X anymore, which reinforces that “so‐and‐so is an X” was only a meta‐represented claim all along. This is Émile Durkheim's classic homo duplex—the individual organism with its intrinsic drives and motives, juxtaposed with a social entity straining to meet its externally imposed obligations (Durkheim ).

Following Carsten Herrmann‐Pillath (), we can describe the homo duplex in terms of two types of, or “channels” for, motivating behavior: the “efficient‐causal” channel and the “semiotic” channel. In the efficient‐causal channel, people act on the basis of intrinsic motives such as hunger, pain avoidance, sleepiness, and so on. These things are physiological “brute facts” in Searle's terminology, not social subjunctives. If I am hungry, I do not meta‐represent the proposition “I am hungry” within a social frame, and being hungry is not a performance. I just am hungry. The belief that I am hungry is automatically fixated and integrated with the rest of my inferential belief network, such as factual beliefs about where I can get food.

By contrast, in the semiotic channel, our motives stem from collective meta‐representations that impose desire‐independent reasons for action, such as status functions. These motivations would be impossible without symbolic communication between agents: a proposition such as “This ceremony transforms you into a wife and daughter‐in‐law” could have no practical meaning if multiple agents did not agree on it. Such propositions do not motivate our behavior in an immediate or instinctive way. Instead, they force us to abstractly represent a sequence of distal consequences, obligations, desired or feared outcomes, and so on, all of which are ultimately social. The semiotic channel, then, motivates us to perform actions that match other agents’ predictions based on our role and status, independently of intrinsic (efficient‐causal) motives.

Ritual

This emphasis on performative behavior helps explain why ritualized actions are so widespread in religion and the transcendental social world (Purzycki and Sosis ). Many writers have cited some combination of stereotypy, formalization, repetitiveness, exaggeration, and “goal demotion,” or a de‐emphasis on practical objectives, as core features of ritualized behavior (Erikson ; Rappaport ; Bell [1992] ; Kapitány and Nielsen ). These features have in common a functional capacity to highlight, mark off, and draw attention to their targets without being limited by those targets’ utilitarian or practical features (Smith ). They are thus ideally suited for establishing redundancy and clarity in signaling—that is, for reinforcing messages whose contents may not be intrinsically clear (Leach ). Simply put, we do not need to ritualize propositions that can be easily derived from physical facts, such as “water is good for boiling food.” Instead, we ritualize claims that cannot be empirically evaluated, such as “today is Buddha's birthday” or “daughters‐in‐law must show respect.”

In other words, propositions about status functions and transcendental social roles are not reducible to objective facts, and so could always be other than how they are. Someone else could have married Mr. Kim's son. Marriage could come with X set of obligations instead of Y. Without objective constraints on institutional propositions, what is needed instead is reinforcement. Thus, much everyday interaction ritual (Collins ) uses conspicuous, formalized, often repetitive motor and speech acts to emphasize messages that would remain ambiguous if we focused only on physical‐causal facts. That is to say, goal‐demoted and ritualized actions—such as conspicuously turning away to drink from a cup in front of an elder, an action that is not at all causally relevant to the practical goal of getting liquid into one's mouth—generate social structure.

We arrive, then, at a hierarchically structured social and cognitive environment, populated with complementary (not identical) roles, in which a significant proportion of our behavior results from semiotic causation, not efficient‐causal motives. This is a “religious” world, in the sense that it is richly structured by ritual and filled with invisible, often revered, entities. Behavior is relatively predictable based on mutual knowledge of role templates and status functions, and differing roles produce conventional affordances, such as the obligations that members of a hierarchical family owe each other. But a processual understanding of ritual shows us that this is only one‐half of the story. The other half is composed of behaviors and cognitions that are, paradoxically, more tightly coupled to objective facts and immediate motivations, yet often experienced as more “transcendent” (not “transcendental”) than everyday status functions and roles. So while the imagined social world is “our [near‐] permanent perceptual state” (Fuentes , 180), it is in departing from the subjunctive world—that is, halting the rituals that sustain transcendental social structure—that people catalyze many of the most phenomenologically arresting dimensions of human religiosity, such as religious ASCs. To achieve this aim, a different kind of ritual is called for: ritual of antistructure.

The Neural Architecture of Antistructure

It may be helpful to briefly go a little deeper into the neurocognitive scaffolding of antistructural ritual. The temporoparietal junction (TPJ), linking the brain's inferior parietal and superior temporal cortices, is implicated in sustaining a basic sense of personal identity—including self–other distinctions and bodily location in space (Blanke et al. ; Ionta et al. ). This cortical region also turns out to be a central node for social cognition, including imitation inhibition, discriminating between self and others, and ToM (Santiesteban et al. ; Igelström and Graziano ). Artificial stimulation of the right TPJ leads to maladaptively low levels of mimicry, even in social situations where mutual imitation would be socially helpful (Duffy et al. ; although see Hogeveen et al. ).

It is therefore not surprising that performing complementary motor actions—that is, watching other agents perform actions that differ from the ego's—appears to preferentially activate portions of the TPJ, whereas performing convergent, or identical, actions downregulates it (Newman‐Norlund et al. ). Accordingly, synchronous entrainment to a highly predictable, shared rhythm appears to be associated with quiescence in the TPJ and related areas of the social cognition network, especially when synchrony leads to positive social rapport (Fairhurst, Janata, and Keller ; Cacioppo et al. ). This network also includes the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which assists top‐down modulation of imitation (Kühn, Haggard, and Brass ; Wang and Hamilton ; Schurz et al. ). During synchrony with an optimally adaptive partner, the dmPFC is downregulated, but when struggling to adapt to an asynchronous or out‐of‐step rhythm it becomes active (Fairhurst, Janata, and Keller ; Cacioppo et al. ). Within a predictive processing framework, this quiescence of the social‐cognitive network is likely due to a reduced need for complex social prediction during rhythmic synchrony, since synchronic actions are highly stable and repetitive (Fairhurst, Janata, and Keller ).

The networks of the brain that are most heavily involved in social cognition and predicting social behavior, then, appear to be preferentially downregulated during the sorts of rhythmic synchrony that generate trances or religious ASCs during ecstatic religious rites—and which catalyze Turnerian antistructure. Indeed, the TPJ is also recruited for sustaining in‐group parochialism and out‐group discrimination—establishing higher level, subjunctive “self‐other” social boundaries that are often delineated by symbolic markers (Baumgartner et al. ), implying that symbolic group identities and boundaries may become less salient as this brain region goes dormant. Accordingly, participants in interpersonal synchrony become more generous and cooperative toward members of in‐groups and out‐groups alike, suggesting that group‐level distinctions are cognitively minimized by synchronous rhythm (Reddish, Bulbulia, and Fischer ). At multiple levels, rhythmic synchrony thus literally blurs self and other (Hove ), but also reduces the salience of symbolic boundaries. Self‐transcendence in ecstatic dance thus appears to be transcendence over our institutional selves.

Other “Religious” Experiences

Other types of experiences that are often included within the bucket category of “religious” phenomena exhibit certain convergent features. OBEs, for example, involve a strong sense of dislocation from one's physical body, sometimes including autoscopy, or the experience of seeing one's own body at a distance. Blanke and Arzy () and Blanke et al. () found that OBEs were precipitated by disruption of the TPJ, leading to abnormal integration of low‐level sensory data with processing of the self.

However, in many forms of meditation, recruitment of this cortical region is intensified compared to baseline, and long‐term meditation may longitudinally increase TPJ gray matter density (Hölzel et al. ; Yang et al. ). These findings may reflect an enhanced focus on bodily and spatial awareness during forms of meditation that emphasize “open monitoring,” or effortful, putatively detached focus on bodily sensations and environmental stimuli (Yang et al. ). Note, however, that here too the focus is not on conventional affordances or institutional status functions. If a Vipassana meditator hears a police siren in the distance, she is ideally meant to isolate that auditory stimulus from any conventional associations—which means screening out the institutional or normative implications of categories like “police” and “law.” In other words, she treats the stimulus like a sound, not a symbolic reference to an institutional reality. To the extent that this form of meditation is a “self‐transcendent” experience, it may be so not because it disorients the perception of the body in three‐dimensional space, as an OBE does, but precisely because by rooting the self's experience of the body in tangible, exteroceptive sense experience it downgrades the importance of the symbolic institutional world (cf. van Elk and Aleman ).

Antistructure and Common Traits of Religious Experience

As Ann Taves () has argued, the attribution of a transcendent or religious valence marks “religious” experiences off from others. To make this attribution, agents must be embedded in a culture that offers such a category in the first place. Thus, Person A and Person B might have qualitatively identical experiences during a collective, rhythmic dance, but Person A might have the conceptual framework to call that experience “religious,” while for Person B it was just a good time. However, a number of traits have often been associated with ecstatic experiences that are tagged by many subjects as religious or transcendent. A processual view of ritual—in which ritual practice toggles between reinforcing transcendental social structure and relativizing it through antistructure—can usefully account for these traits. I will specifically focus here on undeniability (James [1902] 1982), association with extreme or base physiological states (Bakhtin [1984] 2009), and susceptibility to intentional manipulation (Olaveson ). ³

Undeniability, according to William James ([1902] 1982), is the sense that a religious experience is mandatorily self‐evident. One can entertain doubt about institutional facts, for instance, cynically (“Is this river really the border between our two countries, or are borders just oppressive social constructs?”). But one cannot entertain doubts about the sensory features of a profound experience. The phenomenology seems to be tautologically self‐evidencing. This putative dimension of religious or transcendent experience matches well with antistructure's characteristic downplaying of cultural meta‐representations. As we have seen, during rhythmic synchrony, the urge to dance and the rhythmic unison between bodies are something like what Searle () calls “brute facts.” They are not status functions, and they do not influence our behavior through the semiotic channel. They signify group unity indexically: that is, they refer to group unity by being it (Peirce ; Rappaport ). Antistructure by its nature emphasizes that which is undeniable, and so relativizes that which is not—particularly conventional affordances, institutional status functions, and transcendental roles.

It seems fitting, then, that many ecstatic or expressive religious experiences are accompanied by gross physiological motifs. By this I mean roughly the highlighting of bodily processes, which are about as undeniable, in terms of possible objects of experience, as it gets. In many carnivalesque ritual settings, thematic emphasis is commonly placed on bodily functions, including sexuality and eating (Bakhtin [1984] 2009). These appetitive functions motivate behavior along the efficient‐causal channel, not the semiotic one. The phenomenon of carnival, then, is antistructural precisely in its redirection of participants’ shared focus away from normative, invisible status functions (“This man counts as a king!”) to brute bodily facts (“This man has genitals and eats food, like the rest of us!”). In general, then, we should (maybe paradoxically) expect a positive association between heightened salience of the body qua body (not the body qua incumbent of a social role) and ASCs tagged as spiritual, religious, or transcendent.

The use of somatic themes in carnival points to another important feature of such experiences: while many observers have argued that they cannot be mechanistically generated (James [1902] 1982), most cultures do in fact have standardized means of achieving—even carefully enabling—sanctioned religious ASCs (Schjødt and Andersen ). For example, Lakota Sioux have historically pursued visions by means of fasting, vigils, or sweat lodges (Powers ). Notably, these manipulations all increase the salience of physiological homeostatic drives by preventing their satisfaction. Emically, fasting, vigils, and sweat lodges are said to clarify the mind and so open it to spiritual influences. Etically, they are—at minimum—a means of reducing the salience of transcendental social roles and status functions, because, quite simply, it is hard to perform an institutional role when you are starving and exhausted. The Lakota vision quest is thus paradigmatic in centralizing antistructure by highlighting the body's core needs, and so shifting toward efficient‐causal motives. Physical stressors may also overtax executive cognitive functions that have been found to downregulate religious ASCs (Cristofori et al. ). Other established means of activating culturally sanctioned religious ASCs, such as psychotropic drug use (Millière ) or repetitive drumming (Hove et al. ) operate along analogous lines.

Predictions and Research Agendas

An interpretive framework is only as useful as its ability to generate testable, empirical predictions. Several such predictions relevant to CESR emerge from the neurocognitive research reviewed above. Recall that interpersonal rhythmic synchrony may dampen activity in the brain's social cognition and social prediction networks. These circuits, in turn, are likely implicated in processing conventional affordances, because conventional affordances are inherently social (Fiebich ). If this is the case, then a number of consequences follow. First, synchrony ought to lead not only to enhanced intuitive cooperativeness due to heightened efficient‐causal motives for social affiliation (e.g., Wiltermuth and Heath ), but also to reduced salience for cultural meta‐representations, or claims that (1) require reflective cognitive processing and (2) influence behavior via semiotic motives. Transcendental social roles and institutional status functions are prime examples. So, for example, research subjects who engage in rhythmic synchrony might subsequently attribute less legitimacy to institutional propositions such as “wives owe their fathers‐in‐law filial piety,” or may simply require longer processing times to assess such propositions.

Second, exposure to third‐party rhythmic social stimuli has been shown to affect subjects’ attributive ideas about the performers. For example, research subjects who witness groups of agents performing in synchrony attribute greater entitativity and coalition strength to those groups (Hagen and Bryant ; Lakens ). We can thus predict that research subjects who witness agents performing in synchrony should attribute less salience to those agents’ differentiated social roles. Moreover, since transcendental roles are typically arranged hierarchically (Graeber and Sahlins ), performing in synchrony should catalyze greater within‐group egalitarianism among participants (cf. Olaveson ). Witnessing third‐party synchrony should lead to greater attributions of a flat social structure among the agents (such as groups of animated stick figures; Lakens ) that are “performing” the synchronous rhythm. ⁴

Third, social structure is thought to enable task‐focused coordination and efficient division of labor (Turner [1969] 1996; Van Vugt, Hogan, and Kaiser ; Ronay et al. ), implying that antistructural ritual would be maladaptive in certain contexts. Put simply, if synchrony flattens social structure, it ought to also negatively impact coordination. Previous research has hinted that synchrony can indeed hamper interdependent coordination (Lang et al. ; Wood, Caldwell‐Harris, and Stopa ), but more robust study designs are needed to test these hypotheses comprehensively.

Finally, many theorists have suggested that “ecstatic religion” introduces flexibility into, or facilitates adaptive change within, social hierarchies (Bourguignon ; Turner ; Whitehouse ). Phenomenologically, this claim seems accurate, but a neurocognitive perspective offers new avenues for its empirical evaluation. The transcendental social structure provides the basis for the formal stratification of the social world (Bloch ). This structure is sustained by the cognitive meta‐representation of institutional facts and conventional affordances, calling for extensive social prediction within individual minds—the cortical networks for which may be dampened by motor synchrony. It now seems more than heuristic hand‐waving, then, to suggest that people may wish to participate more in synchrony when their social structures chronically fail to provide utility. Iconoclasm and antiritualist ideology may thus emerge as a semi‐coordinated reaction against conventional social structures precisely by refocusing people's attention onto objective, noncontingent facts that anyone from any culture could agree on, and by motivating behavior via efficient‐causal instead of semiotic channels.

Some potential historical and ethnographic examples of this effect include the remarkable, apparently worldwide appeal of ecstatic possession cults to low‐status or socially marginal people (Lewis ; Bourguignon ) and the sudden appearance of modern Pentecostalism among marginalized African Americans during the first Gilded Age (Wacker ). However, only rigorous operationalization of the relevant factors and sophisticated tests of cross‐cultural datasets could assess this prediction across cultures and regions. Computational methods would also be well suited to exploring these sociocultural hypotheses (Tolk et al. ).

Open Research Questions

In addition to the foregoing hypotheses, a processual model of ritual and antistructure raises a number of broader research questions for CESR. Here, these questions are not formalized into discrete hypotheses, but are simply highlighted as avenues for future research:

• What is the social and cognitive difference between subdued or low‐expressiveness synchrony (such as marching in cadence; McNeill ) and ecstatic synchrony (such as seen in rave dancers or religious trance rituals; Winkelman )? Tarr et al. () found that both synchrony and physical exertion independently stimulated social bonding and increased pain tolerance; what independent effects might be found for processing of institutional norms, roles, and status functions?

• Near‐death experiences (NDEs) and other self‐transcendent experiences, such as psilocybin trips, are often associated with subsequent expressions of universalistic spirituality and lessened interest in social‐structural hierarchy (Griffiths et al. ; Greyson ). Do the brains of NDE survivors or experiencers of religious ASCs process contingent social norms or meta‐represent status functions differently than others? To what extent is “spirituality” (as opposed to “religiousness”) formally associable with an antistructural cognitive orientation?

• Newberg and D'Aquili found that certain kinds of meditation appear to downregulate a different cortical network than the social cognition circuit described above; specifically, they reported that superior parietal regions responsible for bodily orientation in three‐dimensional space were downregulated during certain forms of meditation (Newberg, D'Aquili, and Rause ). What kinds of interventions lead to the downregulation of these different networks? In what ways can they both be said to produce the conditions for religious ASCs? Note that this question may afford the possibility for falsifying one of the central predictions of the proposed framework: that religious ASCs are made possible when the salience of conventional affordances is reduced and social prediction is deemphasized.

• Similarly, if social cognition is truly downregulated during religious ASCs, why do so many religious ASCs feature interactions with personal beings such as gods or spirits? In what way, if any, do the cognitive processes that enable prediction of other actors’ role‐based behavior differ from the representation of spiritual/nonphysical beings? How do religious ASCs—in comparison to more structured religious experiences (cf. Van Leeuwen and van Elk )—relate to default cognitive biases for anthropomorphism, teleology, and so on?

• Are there neurocognitive differences between how human minds process mere conventions (“Walk on the left side of the sidewalk”) and how they process the ontology of institutional and transcendental social structures (“Seoul is the capital of Korea”)? That is, how are institutional processed in the brain, as opposed to mere institutional rules?

• If there really is an inextricable normative component to even basic institutional propositions, then there should be clear distinctions between the ways brains process neutral objective facts (“This apple is red”) and institutional ones (“This man is a priest”). Or does internalization of normative, institutional claims (e.g., Berger and Luckmann ; Gintis ), if successful, render those claims simply part of the “cognitive background:” intuitive beliefs that are fully integrated into our inferential cognitive networks (Sperber ; Van Leeuwen )?

• What role do cognitive content and context biases play in the development of transcendental social structure and in transitions to antistructure? It seems clear that prestige and conformity biases (Henrich and Boyd ; Henrich and Gil‐White ) would constrain the learning and acceptance of institutional status functions. Neurocognitive networks for processing social hierarchy are likely also central; notably, Caroline Zink et al. () showed that processing unstable social hierarchies recruits social‐cognition brain networks. How, then, does the downregulation of these social‐cognition networks during synchrony or other antistructural experiences affect the dynamics of cultural transmission or the epidemiology of representations, cross‐sectionally or longitudinally (Sperber and Hirschfield )?

• Bulbulia and Schjødt () observed that the dorsal striatum mediates “second‐order motivational mechanisms” that reflect delayed gratification for abstract goals, while the nucleus accumbens underlies more immediate rewards. The framework I have advanced here therefore seems to predict that antistructural rituals would shift the balance of reward activity from the striatum to the nucleus accumbens. Yet Schjødt et al. () found that different types of prayer, respectively, activated the striatum and social‐cognitive cortical networks, including the TPJ‐mPFC. Can neuroimaging research identify a genuine natural‐kind distinction between semiotic and efficient‐causal motives (cf. Robinson )?

• Ritual antistructure is not the only means of social transformation or resistance; in a multilevel perspective, how do the cognitive effects of antistructure and religious ASCs interact with other drivers of change, such as ecological or political pressures or the effects of technological advancement (Sosis )?

The foregoing list is not exhaustive. A research framework that picks up where Turner ([1969] 1996; ) left off, supplemented by insights from CESR, offers manifold directions for productive research. In a processual model, some rituals—constrained, inhibitory, and predictably parsed—proceed from semiotic motives to reinforce transcendental social structures, while others capitalize on efficient‐causal motives to downplay those same structures and activate intrinsic motives. Such a model enjoys productive contact with a number of progressive research programs in the social and cognitive sciences, particularly in evolutionary anthropology and predictive coding models of cognition. It complements influential dichotomous theories of ritual in CESR (McCauley and Lawson ; Whitehouse ) by highlighting social prediction in conventional affordances and by linking ritual behavior to the cognitive processing of invisible social others (including gods), while remaining agnostic about the relative frequency of or memory‐encoding processes for the two poles. Pursuing the research lines that emerge from these points of contact will enable CESR researchers to generate clarified understandings of social cognition, the interplay between cognitive constraints and cultural innovation, and the evolutionary relationship between religion and language.