The consideration of humans going through sensitive periods of life, such as childhood and the early postpartum, may be helpful in understanding the cognitive and evolutionary puzzle of human rituals. During such periods, certain brain systems may mediate an increased susceptibility to learn new behaviors, rational or irrational.

The architecture of the hazard management system underlying precautionary behavior makes functional sense, given the adaptive computational problems it evolved to solve. Many seeming infelicities in its outputs, such as behavior with apparent lack of rational motivation or disproportionality, are susceptibilities that derive from the sheer computational difficulty posed by the problem of cost-effectively deploying countermeasures to rare, harmful threats.

In conflating opposing meanings of the term ritual, arising from historical Western cultural conflicts regarding church and state, this target article begs fundamental questions. Its appeals to cognitive science concepts such as working memory are poorly informed and obfuscate what could have been a far more penetrating and less biased discussion of stereotyped human action.

Although we agree that ritualized behavior is a mystery that calls out for an explanation, we do not think that the proposed domain-specific two-component system offers an empirically well-justified and theoretically parsimonious description of the phenomena. Instead, we believe that the deployment of domain-general mechanisms based on choice of actions could also explain the essential features of ritualized behavior.

Boyer & Lienard (B&L) elegantly elaborate the links between normal motivational systems and psychopathology and address the evolutionary and cultural context of ritualized behaviors. However, their model omits a key property of the security-motivation (hazard-precaution) system, and this property suggests that ritualized behavior may generate an alternate satiety signal by substituting, in place of uncertainty, a problem that is verifiably solvable.

In reply to commentary on our target article, we supply further evidence and hypotheses in the description of ritualized behaviors in humans. Reactions to indirect fitness threats probably activate specialized precaution systems rather than a unified form of danger-avoidance or causal reasoning. Impairment of precaution systems may be present in pathologies other than obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), autism in particular. Ritualized behavior is attention-grabbing enough to be culturally transmitted whether or not it is associated with group identity, cohesion, or with any other social aspect of collective ceremonies.