Humans have an instinct that is specific to arbitrary rituals, which we see as signaling group loyalty: Show a child how to perform some action that they haven’t seen before, and they will faithfully replicate not only the steps required to achieve the goal, but also superfluous ones. Why they do this is a puzzle, especially as other animals do not. … What if children can identify actions as causally opaque? If so, perhaps their brains see them as a cue to switch from normal reasoning to a “ritual stance” in which they interpret the behaviour of others as social signals, and go out of their way to copy them. … Children copy apparently aimless sequences of actions more faithfully than sequences that move towards an obvious goal. …