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At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet,... more
At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to such “nonordinary experiences” (NOEs) was never fully realize due to disciplinary siloing and the challenges involved in comparing culture-laden accounts. Today, psychologists tend to reify constructs, such as religious or spiritual, extraordinary (psychical, paranormal, anomalous, or exceptional), and psychopathological. In doing so, they face an unresolved challenge: experiences with phenomenologically distinct features may be appraised similarly within a culture (that is, viewed as evidence for the same culturally-specific construct) and experiences that share phenomenological features may be appraised differently across cultures. Here, we call for a renewed approach to comparing NOEs across cult...
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Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left... more
Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of mechanisms, whether biological, psychological and/or socio-cultural, through which these experiences are represented and differentiated. So called-mystical experiences, which some psychologists view as potentially sui generis, provide a test case for assessing whether we can develop an expanded framework for studying unusual experiences across disciplines and cultures. Evidence for the special nature of ‘mystical experience’ rests on the operationalization of a metaphysically untestable construct in two widely used self-report scales: the Mysticism Scale and the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire. Consideration of the construct in light of research on alterations in sense of self induced by psychoactive drugs and medit...
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Download a branded Cambridge Journals Online toolbar (for IE 7 only). What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make... more
Download a branded Cambridge Journals Online toolbar (for IE 7 only). What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study ...
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Max Weber's (1978) Economy and Society embeds religion, or, more precisely, religious behaviour in a sociology of social action, grounded in the subjective meaning that actors implicitly or explicitly attach to their behaviour.... more
Max Weber's (1978) Economy and Society embeds religion, or, more precisely, religious behaviour in a sociology of social action, grounded in the subjective meaning that actors implicitly or explicitly attach to their behaviour. Although his approach is sometimes referred to as “interpretive sociology”, Weber was equally concerned with interpretation and explanation (1978: 4—5). He began with action as understood from the point of view of the actor or actors, then sought to situate it within “an understandable sequence of motivation”, taking into account a range of factors (e.g. biological, psychological, social, environmental), many of them outside of subjective awareness and largely devoid of conscious meaning. He then attempted to determine the relative weight of the various factors in relation to the action in question. He assumed that hypotheses regarding the weight that should be assigned to various causal factors required testing. In some cases, hypotheses could be tested ...
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SACRALITIES For inclusion in: Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal Park, eds., The Handbook of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2 nd ed. Guilford, 2012. Building Blocks of Sacralities: A new basis for comparison across cultures and... more
SACRALITIES For inclusion in: Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal Park, eds., The Handbook of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2 nd ed. Guilford, 2012. Building Blocks of Sacralities: A new basis for comparison across cultures and religions Ann Taves University of California at Santa Barbara Author Note The author thanks Ralph Hood, Jared Lindahl, Bryan Rennie, and Ted Slingerland for their comments on the first draft and the members of the Southern California Working Group in Cognition, Culture, and Religion – especially Justin Barrett, Pete Hill, and Rebekah Richert – for precipitating a thoroughgoing revision more closely attuned to the target audience. Above all, I thank my husband (and editor) not only for reading every draft numerous times, but also for many more discussions of the content than a chapter author had any right to expect!
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Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concepts of religion and spirituality in a way that allows scientists to operationalize component parts and historians of religion to consider how... more
Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concepts of religion and spirituality in a way that allows scientists to operationalize component parts and historians of religion to consider how the component parts have been synthesized into larger socio-cultural wholes. Doing so involves two steps: (1) distinguishing between (a) the generic elements that structure definitions and (b) the specific features used to characterize the generic elements as “religious” or “sacred” and (2) disaggregating these specific features into more basic cognitive processes that scientists can operationalize and that historians can analyze in situ. Three more basic processes that interact on multiple levels are proposed: perceiving salience, assessing significance, and imagining hypothetical, counterfactual content.
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In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over... more
In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted as a legitimate object of study, whereas the former was not. Comparison of the Congresses suggests that those interested in the study of religion were willing to forego the quest for objective evidence and focus on experience, whereas those most invested in psychical research were not. The shift in focus did not overcome many of the methodological difficulties. Sub-specialization formalized distinctions between psychical, religious, and pathological phenomena; obscured similarities; and undercut the nascent comparative study of unusual experi...
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The Mormon claim that Joseph Smith discovered ancient golden plates buried in a hillside in upstate New York is too often viewed in simple either/or terms, such that the plates either existed, making Smith the prophet he claimed to be, or... more
The Mormon claim that Joseph Smith discovered ancient golden plates buried in a hillside in upstate New York is too often viewed in simple either/or terms, such that the plates either existed, making Smith the prophet he claimed to be, or did not, making him deceptive or delusional. If we assume that there were no ancient golden plates and at the same that Smith was not a fraud, then the task of historical explanation is more complex. Building on a review of the evidence for the materiality of the plates, the paper uses a series of comparisons — between the golden plates and sacred objects in other religious traditions, between Smith’s claims and claims that psychiatrists define as delusional, and between Smith’s role as a seer and the role of the artist and the physician as skilled perceivers — to generate a greater range of explanatory options. In light of these comparisons, we can view the materialization of the golden plates in naturalistic terms as resulting from an interaction...
Research Interests: Religion, Philosophy, Revelation, Naturalism, Mormonism, and 3 moreJoseph Smith, Book of Mormon, and Numen
We can foster collaboration between the academic study of religion and the sciences, particularly the biological and psychological sciences, if we (1) construct a common object of study that can be positioned within an evolutionary... more
We can foster collaboration between the academic study of religion and the sciences, particularly the biological and psychological sciences, if we (1) construct a common object of study that can be positioned within an evolutionary paradigm, (2) adopt a building block approach to the study of religion that distinguishes between religions and the more elementary phenomena that comprise them, and (3) operationalize abstract concepts as behavioral interactions in order to gain a better understanding of the process whereby people construct religions and other complex things out of more elementary phenomena that they view as special.<xref ref-type="fn" rid="FN1">1</xref>
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The Power of the Paranormal (and Extraordinary)Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. By Jeffrey J. Kripal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. xvi+370.Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. By Jeffrey J. Kripal. Chicago: Univers...more
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Sørensen’s (2007) cognitive theory of magic offers more precise tools for analysing the cognitive dimensions of novelty and change across a range of cultural domains if we extract it from academic discussions of “religion” and “magic” and... more
Sørensen’s (2007) cognitive theory of magic offers more precise tools for analysing the cognitive dimensions of novelty and change across a range of cultural domains if we extract it from academic discussions of “religion” and “magic” and recast it generically in terms of the attribution of non-ordinary powers within temporally structured event-frames. Focusing on the agreements required to generate new collective rituals reveals the chief limitation of Sørensen’s theory of magic and Lawson and McCauley’s theory of ritual for understanding the emergence of new groups with new rituals: neither attends sufficiently to the contestations surrounding the interpretation of presumed originatory events, either when the original attributions are made or when “reformers” reanalyse them. Reformation Era debates over the Eucharist illustrate how subtle shifts in the interpretation of originatory events can signal critical shifts in counterpart connections that in turn lay the foundation for new...
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Cognitive Sciences of Religion scholar Ann Taves is the proponent of a ground-breaking building block approach (BBA) to religious experience. According to Taves, religious experience can be disaggregated into fundamental, constitutive... more
Cognitive Sciences of Religion scholar Ann Taves is the proponent of a ground-breaking building block approach (BBA) to religious experience. According to Taves, religious experience can be disaggregated into fundamental, constitutive components. Philosopher Martin Fortier and anthropologist Maddalena Canna explore the conceptual, anthropological and cognitive aspects of the foundations of religion, as disaggregated by Taves. In her analyses of the cognitive underpinnings of religion, Taves adopts a Predictive Coding Framework (PCF). The compatibility between PCF and BBA is discussed at the light of the debate opposing inherentist and attributionist theories of religion. Particular attention is given to the role of paradox and non-ordinary experiences (NOE) in the emergence of belief. Finally, other fundamental components of religion are explored, such as the relation between perception (e.g. the vividness of a spiritual vision) and attribution of reality, as well as the interplay b...
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When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden... more
When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden concepts, such as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual,’ are used to interpret or appraise contested aspects of human life within and across cultures. To illustrate the distinction, we contrast the traditional research design that the Religious Experience Research Centre used to survey and compare “religious experience” in the UK and China with the appraisal-based design used by the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE). Instead of operationalizing “religious experience,” the INOE distinguishes between generically-worded experiences and the way the experiences are appraised. When coupled with item level validation to ensure that queries are understood as intended, the generically-worded experiences function as common features that allow us to compare simi...
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In the social sciences, validity refers to the adequacy of a survey (or other mode of assessment) for its intended purpose. Validation refers to the activities undertaken during and after the construction of the survey to evaluate and... more
In the social sciences, validity refers to the adequacy of a survey (or other mode of assessment) for its intended purpose. Validation refers to the activities undertaken during and after the construction of the survey to evaluate and improve validity. Item validation refers here to procedures for evaluating and improving respondents’ understanding of the questions and response options included in a survey. Ver- bal probing techniques such as cognitive interviews can be used to understand respondents’ response process, that is, what they are thinking as they answer the survey items. Although cognitive interviews can provide evidence for the validity of survey items, they are time-consuming and thus rarely used in practice. The Response Process Evaluation (RPE) method is a newly-developed technique that utilizes open-ended meta-surveys to rapidly collect evidence of validity across a population of interest, make quick revisions to items, and immediately test these revisions across ne...
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Press. Malley, B., & Barrett, J. L. (2003). Can ritual form be predicted from religious belief? A test of the Lawson-McCauley hypotheses. Journal of Ritual Studies, 17(2), 1–14. Nichols, R., Lynn, J., & Purzycki, B. G. (2014).... more
Press. Malley, B., & Barrett, J. L. (2003). Can ritual form be predicted from religious belief? A test of the Lawson-McCauley hypotheses. Journal of Ritual Studies, 17(2), 1–14. Nichols, R., Lynn, J., & Purzycki, B. G. (2014). Toward a science of science fiction: Applying quantitative methods to genre individuation. Scientific Study of Literature, 4(1), 25–45. doi:10.1075/ssol.4.1.02nic Pyysiäinen, I. (2009). Supernatural agents: Why we believe in souls, gods, and Buddhas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seshat Databank. (2017). Seshat: Global history databank. Retrieved from http://seshatdatabank.info/ Sheikh, H., Gómez, Á., & Atran, S. (2016). Empirical evidence for the devoted actor model. Current Anthropology, 57 (13), S204–S209. doi:10.1086/686221 Slingerland, E., Nichols, R., Neilbo, K. L., & Logan, C. (2017). The distant reading of religious texts: A “Big Data” approach to mind-body concepts in early China. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 85(4), 985–1016. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfw090 Stark, R. (1996). Why religious movements succeed or fail: A revised general model. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 11(2), 133–146. doi:10.1080/13537909608580764 Stark, R., & Bainbridge, W. S. (1987). A theory of religion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Swann, W. B., & Buhrmester, M. D. (2015). Identity fusion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 52–57. doi:10.1177/0963721414551363 Taves, A. (2016). Revelatory events: Three case studies of the emergence of new spiritual paths. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The Database of Religious History. (2015). The database of religious history. Retrieved from http://www. religiondatabase.arts.ubc.ca/ Upal, M. A. (2005). Towards a cognitive science of new religious movements. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5(1), 214–239. doi:10.1163/1568537054068598
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Two basic problems that scholars of religion routinely confrontspecifying an object of study and figuring out how to study itcan be construed as opportunities. Scholars of religion typically overcome the difficulties inherent in... more
Two basic problems that scholars of religion routinely confrontspecifying an object of study and figuring out how to study itcan be construed as opportunities. Scholars of religion typically overcome the difficulties inherent in specifying their object of study by offering a ...
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Religious experience played a prominent role in the psychological study of religion in the early decades of the twentieth-century, then waned as behaviorist and quantitative approaches became more prominent, and reemerged in the second... more
Religious experience played a prominent role in the psychological study of religion in the early decades of the twentieth-century, then waned as behaviorist and quantitative approaches became more prominent, and reemerged in the second half of the twentieth century alongside, and largely distinct from, mystical experience and, more recently, spirituality. Compared to the past, current research places less stress on sudden subjective experiences and more on ordinary (spiritual) experiences and gradual (spiritual) transformations that can take place in the context of practices or everyday life (struggle and coping). Ralph Hood, who is widely recognized as the leading expert in this area, makes a sharp distinction between religious and spiritual experiences, which must be defined by individuals and/or traditions, and mystical experience, which he views as a cross-culturally stable experiential core of religion and spirituality. Consideration of research on religious, mystical, anomalou...
In light of the framing of Asprem’s book in terms of Problemgeschichte, we can ask what is meant by a “problem.” Problems, as he uses it, are grounded in human experience, which means that for problems to be problems people have to... more
In light of the framing of Asprem’s book in terms of Problemgeschichte, we can ask what is meant by a “problem.” Problems, as he uses it, are grounded in human experience, which means that for problems to be problems people have to perceive them as such. The problem of disenchantment thus entails both (1) the perception of the problem and (2) various responses to the problem. Asprem focuses primarily on the way people responded to the problem. But we can also ask how, when, and why people perceived the problem in the first place. If recognizing a problem can be construed in terms of “event perception” then we can view Problemgeschichte as involving the perception of problems at a whole range of levels from our perception of the historical past, our personal past, and what just happened, thus allowing for a fuller integration between sociology and psychology.