Methoden vergleichen

	Ritual Density Coding	Minimally Counterintuitive Recall
Fachgebiet	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Familie	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Entstehungsjahr	2004	2001
Urheber	Harvey Whitehouse	Pascal Boyer & Charles Ramble
Typ	Coding scheme for ritual transmission dynamics	Memory-recall experiment for religious-concept transmission
Wegweisende Quelle	Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. ISBN: 9780759106147	Boyer, P., & Ramble, C. (2001). Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations. Cognitive Science, 25(4), 535-564.
Aliasnamen	Modes of Religiosity Coding, Frequency-Arousal Ritual Analysis, Imagistic vs Doctrinal Ritual Coding, Ritual Mode Classification	MCI Recall Paradigm, Counterintuitiveness Recall Experiment, Cognitive Optimum Recall Test, Boyer-Ramble Recall Paradigm
Verwandt	3	3
Zusammenfassung	Ritual density coding is a method for analyzing religious rituals by coding them on two key dimensions - how often they are performed (frequency) and how emotionally intense or dysphoric they are (arousal) - in order to locate a tradition along Harvey Whitehouse's imagistic-doctrinal continuum. In his 2004 book Modes of Religiosity, Whitehouse argued that rituals tend to cluster at two attractor poles: high-frequency, low-arousal 'doctrinal' practices that build large, hierarchically organized, semantically rich traditions, and rare but emotionally searing 'imagistic' practices that forge small, intensely cohesive communities through vivid episodic memories. The coding scheme operationalizes this theory, testing the predicted inverse relationship between ritual frequency and arousal and linking the resulting modes to distinctive forms of social organization and memory.	The minimally counterintuitive (MCI) recall paradigm is an experimental method in the cognitive science of religion that explains why some supernatural concepts spread and persist while others do not. Pascal Boyer and Charles Ramble's 2001 cross-cultural studies, conducted in France, Gabon, and Nepal, tested the hypothesis that concepts which breach a small number of intuitive ontological expectations - a statue that hears prayers, a person who passes through walls - are remembered better than wholly intuitive concepts and better than bizarre concepts that violate too many expectations at once. By embedding intuitive, minimally counterintuitive, and maximally counterintuitive items in narratives and measuring free recall after a delay, the method locates a 'cognitive optimum' of counterintuitiveness that favours cultural transmission, providing an empirical, memory-based account of the recurrent features of religious representations.