{"id":187510,"date":"2022-07-01T07:30:49","date_gmt":"2022-07-01T11:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=187510"},"modified":"2023-01-16T10:30:45","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T15:30:45","slug":"demolishing-schools-after-a-mass-shooting-reflects-our-deep-rooted-desire-for-purification-rituals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2022\/07\/demolishing-schools-after-a-mass-shooting-reflects-our-deep-rooted-desire-for-purification-rituals\/","title":{"rendered":"Demolishing Schools After a Mass Shooting Reflects Our Deep-Rooted Desire for Purification Rituals"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the recent shooting in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers, some\u00a0local residents want the school demolished<\/a>. Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez said that President Joe Biden has offered to help the school district secure a federal grant for the building\u2019s demolition.<\/p>\n

This is not uncommon. In numerous similar cases, buildings were knocked down, abandoned or\u00a0repurposed<\/a>\u00a0in the aftermath of a tragedy. After the\u00a0Sandy Hook massacre<\/a>\u00a0of 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, that school was destroyed and rebuilt on a different spot on the same property, at a cost of US$50 million. And in 1996, the town of Gloucester in England\u00a0bought the house<\/a>\u00a0where a couple, Fred and Rosemary West, raped, tortured, and killed 12 young women. The town razed the property to the ground, burned all timber, pulverized each brick and dumped the debris at a secret location before turning the lot into a park.<\/p>\n

At a visceral level, this seems obvious: Most people would be uncomfortable carrying on business as usual at the site of a bloodbath. But as an anthropologist who studies some of the most\u00a0meaningful human experiences<\/a>, I know that human reactions that feel obvious may often be hard to explain. Why would tearing down and rebuilding it make the situation any better? The answer lies in human psychology.<\/p>\n

Notions of Contagion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Research suggests that we, as humans, are\u00a0natural-born essentialists<\/a>. That is, we intuitively think of objects as having certain immaterial inner qualities or essences, which can be transmitted through contact. For instance,\u00a0participants in an experiment<\/a>\u00a0conducted by psychologists\u00a0Carol Nemeroff<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Paul Rozin<\/a>\u00a0refused to wear a sweater that belonged to a serial killer, although they were happy to wear an identical sweater that belonged to someone else.<\/p>\n

These intuitions can be observed outside of the laboratory as well. For instance, a\u00a0study conducted in Hong Kong<\/a>\u00a0looked at the effects of death on real estate prices. As it turns out, when a murder, suicide or fatal accident occurred in a house, its market value decreased by as much as 25%, and even nearby properties lost part of their value.<\/p>\n

Early anthropologists described this as a form of \u201cmagical thinking.\u201d Scottish anthropologist\u00a0James Frazer<\/a>\u00a0argued that this type of reasoning rests upon\u00a0two basic principles<\/a>\u00a0common in all human societies. The first is the \u201claw of similarity,\u201d the idea that physical resemblance implies some deeper connection. This explains the belief found in many cultures that stabbing a doll that resembles a person could cause harm to that person.<\/p>\n

The second principle is what Frazer called the \u201claw of contagion.\u201d It states that when two things come into contact, they transfer part of their properties to each other. This is why John Lennon\u2019s piano sold for\u00a0over $2 million<\/a>, and why U.S. Rep. Bob Brady took the glass of water from which Pope Francis had drank during a 2015 address to the U.S. Congress and later shared it with his family. The assumption is that some of the qualities of the person who once came in contact with the object will rub off. \u201cAnything the pope touches becomes blessed,\u201d\u00a0Brady said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If these beliefs and behaviors are based on mistaken premises, should we humor them, or should we dismiss them as irrational? Once again, human psychology might provide the answer.<\/p>\n

The Power of Symbolism<\/strong><\/p>\n

We are a symbolic species. We experience things around us based not simply on their physical properties. We care about where they come from, their histories, their connections and what they stand for. This goes beyond what we think about those things \u2013 it also affects how we interact with them.<\/p>\n

Psychologists\u00a0George Newman<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Paul Bloom<\/a>\u00a0designed an experiment<\/a>\u00a0to see whether beliefs about an object\u2019s contagiousness could be altered. They asked people how much they would pay to purchase a sweater previously owned by a beloved celebrity. As they expected, most were willing to shell out substantially more than what a brand-new sweater would cost.<\/p>\n

But here is the twist: When told that it would be thoroughly washed before being handed to them, people were less interested in buying the sweater. Inversely, when the researchers asked them the same question about a famous person they despised, participants were willing to pay a higher price after the item had been sterilized. It appears that physical purification would be perceived as removing part of the sweater\u2019s essence.<\/p>\n

Purification Rites<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cultural traditions around the world tap into these intuitions to soothe people\u2019s fears and anxieties. In some cases, washing the body is meant to cleanse the soul, which is what happens in baptisms. In other cases, purification comes through the destruction of the evil substance or its proxy.<\/p>\n

On New Year\u2019s Day, people in various parts of Latin America build\u00a0life-size effigies<\/a>, or \u201cmu\u00f1ecos,\u201d that resemble wicked things and persons: corrupt public officials, villains, personal foes and even the\u00a0coronavirus<\/a>. Then they set them ablaze. Their demise is meant to exorcise their polluting power and symbolize hope for the coming year.<\/p>\n

Since these practices rely on universal parts of human psychology, they make sense to people who are not religious too. Take, for example, the attendees of\u00a0Burning Man<\/a>, an annual festival in Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Ostensibly, this is a crowd as secular as they come:\u00a0only 5% of them self-identify as religious<\/a>. Yet thousands of people flock to a makeshift temple where they leave memorabilia related to some of their most traumatic experiences. They then gather to watch the temple burn to the ground, many of them in tears, carrying all the bad memories with it.<\/p>\n

There is a powerful cathartic aspect to those purification rituals. Symbolic gestures often speak to our psyche in ways no rational action could ever speak to our intellect. In times of tragedy, it is important to acknowledge this fundamental aspect of our humanity. For even as the pain remains, the knowledge that a tangible reminder of it has been undone can be soothing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Originally published in The Conversation.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Symbolic gestures often speak to our psyche in ways no rational action could ever speak to our intellect<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":187521,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2076,2235,2306],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1902],"class_list":["post-187510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-research","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-voices"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 16:32:50","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187523,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187510\/revisions\/187523"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/187521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187510"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=187510"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=187510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}