Recent work by Gyorgy Gergely, Andrew Whiten and others has explored the significance of causal opaqueness for human cultural evolution, the prevailing view being that humans must use imitation rather than emulation in order to learn from others how to operate causally opaque implements.

This work offers insight into understanding the cultural learning of religious and magical behaviours. The primary reason is that learning by imitation can potentially maintain traditions of such behaviour through overimitation. The current methodological paradigm, which uses a pair of boxes – one transparent, one opaque – is not up to the task, however.

Bringing in earlier research by B.F. Skinner and Stuart Vyse, I will suggest that causal opaqueness has several different aspects, all of which need to be explored. This is because, as I will argue, each of these aspects is likely to produce different features of ritualised behaviour. Using the list of features identified by Pascal Boyer and Pierre Liénard, I will argue that most if not all features of ritualisation can be explained as behavioural responses caused by the human cognitive system’s reaction to particular aspects of causal opaqueness. Thus, for example, internal repetition can be caused by lack of information as to the effectiveness or otherwise of the particular element of the overall behavioural sequence.

This approach to explaining ritualised behaviour has both methodological and theoretical consequences. On the methodological side, it shows the need to develop a means to test the effect of independently varying the different aspects of causal opaqueness upon the ritualisation of the culturally learnt behaviour. One solution is to employ a computer-based method – the difficulty being that cultural learning has sometimes proved less effective in such set-ups. On the theoretical side, it suggests that ritualisation of behaviour is not dependent upon that behaviour being understood in a religious or magical context. Indeed, the supernatural beliefs may potentially merely serve as post-hoc explanations for the behaviour. 

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