Ritual behavior is ubiquitous, marking animal motor patterns, normal and psychopathological behavior in human individuals as well as every human culture. Moreover, formal features of rituals appear to be highly conserved along phylogeny and characterized by a circular and spatio-temporal structure typical of habitual behavior with internal repetition of non-functional acts and redirection of attention to the “script” of the performance. A continuity, based on highly conserved cortico-striatal loops, can be traced from animal rituals to human individual and collective rituals with psychopathological compulsions at the crossing point. The transition from “routinization” to “ritualization” may have been promoted to deal with environmental unpredictability in non-social contexts and, through motor synchronization, to enhance intra-group cohesion and communication in social contexts.

Ultimately, ritual, following its biological constraints exerts a “homeostatic” function on the environment (social and non-social) under conditions of unpredictability.

仪式行为无处不在，标志着动物运动模式，人类个体以及每种人类文化的正常和精神病理学行为。此外，仪式的形式特征在系统发育上似乎是高度保守的，其特征是具有习惯性行为的典型圆形和时空结构，内部重复无功能的行为并将注意力转移到表演的“剧本”上。基于高度保守的皮质-纹状体环的连续性，可以从动物仪式追溯到人类的个人和集体仪式，在交叉点具有精神病理性强迫。从“日常化”到“礼节化”的过渡可能已经得到了促进，以应对非社会环境中的环境不可预测性，并且通过运动同步，

最终，仪式由于其生物学上的限制，在不可预测的条件下对环境（社会和非社会）发挥了“稳态”的作用。