My good colleagues from the “Religion, Ideology, and Prosociality” project and I have just had a chapter published in Advances in Social Simulation (Springer, 2024), titled “Superstition in the cognitive model: Modelling ritualised behaviour as error management.”

You can read about the book here, or download the chapter here.

Abstract: Skinner found that superstitious behaviour in pigeons results from accidental operant conditioning. We use a simple cognitive model based upon reinforcement learning to show that ritualisation of behaviour arises in analagous conditions. This makes it possible to model the creation of ritual traditions using minimal means in agent-based models, thereby opening a novel and potentially highly fruitful approach to the study of this highly significant human behaviour.