Religious behaviors as strategies for organizing groups of people: A social contingency analysis.
Religious acts are kept alive by group approval, not by private anxiety relief.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author looked at church attendance, prayer, and other religious acts.
He asked: what keeps these behaviors going?
Instead of saying "faith reduces fear," he treated the acts like any operant.
He argued the payoff is social—group approval, shared identity, and help from others.
What they found
The paper says religious behavior is not reinforced by private calm.
It is reinforced by the group.
When people sing, kneel, or give money, others smile, nod, or return favors later.
Those social contingencies keep the whole pattern alive.
How this fits with other research
Guerin (1992) set the stage. That paper showed rituals and taboos work the same way—generalized social reinforcement holds them in place. The 1998 piece simply widens the lens to church and prayer.
Layng et al. (1984) took the same operant view of "crazy" talk. They said hallucinations are maintained by attention or escape. The 1998 paper does the same move: it swaps delusions for hymns and finds the same rule—look at the social payoff, not the private cause.
Staddon (2013) seems to clash. It claims values and faith, not facts, drive action. The 1998 paper still uses facts—contingency maps—but agrees that the ultimate reinforcer is social approval, a kind of shared value. The papers talk past each other on method, yet land on the same street: group approval matters more than private relief.
Why it matters
When a client bows her head before lunch, don’t assume she’s calming anxiety.
Watch who nods, who hands her food, who smiles.
Map those social reinforcers and you can help her find the same approval in safer settings.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A social contingency analysis of religion is presented, arguing that individual religious behaviors are principally maintained by the many powerful benefits of participating in social groups rather than by any immediate or obvious consequences of the religious behaviors. Six common strategies are outlined that can shape the behaviors of large groups of people. More specifically, religious behavior is shaped and maintained by making already-existing contingencies contingent upon low-probability, but socially beneficial, group behaviors. Many specific examples of religious themes are then analyzed in terms of these common strategies for social shaping, including taboos, rituals, totems, personal religious crises, and symbolic expression. For example, a common view is that people are anxious about life, death, and the unknown, and that the direct function of religious behaviors is to provide escape from such anxiety. Such an explanation is instead reversed-that any such anxiety is utilized or created by groups through having escape contingent upon members performing less probable behaviors that nonetheless provide important benefits to most individual group members. These generalized beneficial outcomes, rather than escape from anxiety, maintain the religious behaviors and this fits with observations that religions typically act to increase anxiety rather than to reduce it. An implication of this theory is that there is no difference in principle between religious and nonreligious social control, and it is demonstrated that the same social strategies are utilized in both contexts, although religion has been the more historically important form of social control.
The Behavior analyst, 1998 · doi:10.1007/BF03392780