When Rituals Fail: Rationalization, Bayesianism, and Predictive Processing

Why do rituals persist in human societies despite their frequent and observable failures to produce intended outcomes? This paper develops a cognitive account of the rationalization of ritual failure, drawing on insights from anthropology, philosophy of science, and contemporary cognitive science to explain the robustness of ritual systems and the subtle cognitive mechanisms by which they are sustained and reproduced. I argue that belief in ritual efficacy is maintained through systematic processes of rationalization, often involving the invocation of auxiliary hypotheses that absorb disconfirming evidence while shielding central beliefs from revision. Building on Bayesian models of belief updating and the predictive processing framework, I show how the mind's efforts to minimize prediction error lead individuals to preserve coherence in their generative models of the world, even when faced with repeated ritual failure. Rather than signaling irrationality, such rationalizations reflect general cognitive strategies for maintaining explanatory coherence in the face of uncertainty. Over time, however, these strategies result in increasingly elaborate belief systems that complicate but rarely displace foundational commitments. I further argue that although individual-level belief revision does occur (despite much anthropological work suggesting the contrary), its effects are typically muted by social and informational dynamics—such as memory biases, underreporting of failure, pluralistic ignorance, and the protective “design” of rituals themselves—that inhibit the accumulation of collective doubt.