Ritual Explained?

This commentary highlights the important contributions of the target book to the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion and identifies several issues and challenges that should be addressed in future work. The crucial challenges pertain to the need for more thorough theoretical modeling of what religious beliefs add to the effects of ritual behavior, the need for longitudinal studies of mundane but frequently performed individual rituals, and the need for translating the results of basic research on rituals into applied outputs. We describe those challenges in detail and suggest potential remedies and future directions.