Peter Maňo

• Master of Arts
• PhD Student at Masaryk University

This paper investigates socioeconomic variation in motivations for ritual practices among Mauritian Hindus. Using cultural domain analysis, we explore individuals’ reported reasons for engaging in a variety of religious rituals. Our findings demonstrate significant intra-cultural diversity driven by social stratification. Specifically, we observe t...

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 b...

Collective gatherings are often associated with the alignment of psychophysiological states between members of a crowd. While the process of emotional contagion has been studied extensively in dyads as well as at the population level, our understanding of its operation and dynamics as they unfold in real time in real‐world group contexts remains li...

Public ritual acts convey strategic information about the qualities of ritual actors. Although a prolific literature has examined their role in coordinating collective action in a variety of contexts, one of the most common communicative functions of ritual behavior in nature, i.e. its role in signaling mate quality, has received limited empirical...

Research testing evolutionary models of religious morality shows that supernatural beliefs in moralizing gods positively affect prosociality. However, the effects of beliefs related to local supernatural agents have not been extensively explored. Drawing from a Mauritian Hindu sample, we investigated the effects of beliefs and practices related to...

Practitioners reflections on the purpose and meaning of ritual actions are often assumed to be limited, absent, or irrelevant. As a result, many anthropological analyses overlook or brush away native explanations. While it is true that ritual exegesis can often be scarce, the current paper rather focuses on some of the conditions that favor its pre...

Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the imp...

Across all cultures, people frequently engage in ritualized (non-instrumental) behaviors. How do those causally opaque actions affect perceptions of causal efficacy? Using real-life stimuli extracted from NCAA basketball games, we asked fans, players of the game, and subjects naive to the game to predict the outcome of free throw attempts. We found...

For decades, natural scientists have been successfully using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to explain various biological phenomena. The success of the theory in its modern form (neo-Darwinism) lies in its theoretical precision and clear criteria defining the evolutionary process. Recognizing the explanatory and predictive potent...

Every year, Tamil Hindus around the globe celebrate one of the most extreme rituals in the world. The ceremony involves piercing the body with numerous metallic needles, skewers, or rods; carrying heavy decorated structures (kavadi), often weighing over 30 kg; dragging enormous chariots attached to the hips and backs with hooks; and walking on shoe...

The relationship between religion and social behavior has been the subject of longstanding debates. Recent evolutionary models of religious morality propose that particular types of supernatural beliefs related to moralizing and punitive high gods will have observable effects on prosociality. We tested this hypothesis, comparing the effects of dive...

During his first presidential inauguration, Barack Obama got the oath of office wrong, so aftersome intense debates, he eventually had to retake it. At the 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Sochi, one of the five Olympic rings did not light up as planned, whichcreated a fertile ground for mockery and ridicule of the organizers. Similarly, th...

Religious rituals have long puzzled scientists since they consume a lot of energy, time, and resources. What is it about rituals that explains their prevalence? Are there any fitness benefits to ritual participation? Two experiments (visual and auditory stimuli) examine the effect of religious cue intensity on perceived mate attractiveness. Field s...

Priming with religious concepts is known to have a positive effect on prosocial behavior, however the effects of religious primes associated with outgroups remain unknown. To explore this, we conducted a field experiment in a multi-cultural, multi-religious setting (the island of Mauritius). Our design used naturally occurring, ecologically relevan...

In the Cognitive Science of Religion, religion and rituals are not considered assui generis phenomena but as results of ordinary cognition. Lawson and McCauley redirected the study of religion and ritual towards mechanism underlying humanritual behaviour and understood this “cognitive turn” as a complementary approach to the earlier interpretive wo...

„Reklama primäla týchto ľudí naháňať sa za autami a šatami, ktoré nepotrebujú. Generácie pracujú v zamestnaniach, ktoré neznášajú, len aby si mohli kúpiť to, čo v skutočnosti nepotrebujú. A tak sme sa ocitli v situácii, keď nevlastníme veci, ale veci vlastnia nás“, (Klub bitkárov, 1999). Od úsvitu ľudstva je každá spoločnosť charakteristická aplik...