Journal article
Religious rituals in the United Kingdom and Brazil are associated with increased social bonding and pain threshold
- Abstract:
- From an evolutionary perspective, large-scale human groups face an adaptive challenge: maintaining cohesion beyond the limits of one-to-one grooming. Cultural practices that recruit evolved bonding systems may help solve this problem by harnessing mu-opioid psychobiological mechanisms. Religious rituals are cultural practices that consistently promote social cohesion, and here we report a pre-registered large-scale field study examining psychobiological mechanisms underlying these rituals. Participants were tested in the United Kingdom and Brazil at 24 ritual sites (N = 265), with measures taken pre- and post-ritual. Results showed that levels of social bonding (5.4% increase, rR = 0.30) and positive affect (13.1% increase, rR = 0.27) were higher after ritual participation. Importantly, increased social bonding was independently predicted by increases in pain threshold (a proxy for mu-opioid activation; β = 0.13, R2 = 0.02), positive affect (β = 0.25) and connection to a higher power (β = 0.15), even after controlling for country, gender, age and religiosity (R2 = 0.15). This multi-site field study provides experimental yet naturalistic evidence that religious rituals recruit an evolved mu-opioid-based affiliation system that may help sustain cohesion in large congregations, supporting the brain-opioid theory of social attachment.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 621.7KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1098/rspb.2026.1174
Authors
- Publisher:
- The Royal Society
- Journal:
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences More from this journal
- Volume:
- 293
- Issue:
- 2073
- Article number:
- 20261174
- Publication date:
- 2026-06-24
- Acceptance date:
- 2026-05-18
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1471-2954
- ISSN:
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0962-8452
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Source identifiers:
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4261104
- Deposit date:
-
2026-06-24
- ARK identifier:
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Terms of use
- Copyright date:
- 2026
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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