TY - JOUR
T1 - Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths
AU - Luhrmann, Tanya Marie
AU - Weisman, Kara
AU - Aulino, Felicity
AU - Brahinsky, Joshua D.
AU - Dulin, John C.
AU - Dzokoto, Vivian A.
AU - Legare, Cristine H.
AU - Lifshitz, Michael
AU - Ng, Emily
AU - Ross-Zehndera, Nicole
AU - Smith, Rachel
N1 - ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank the research teams and participants in each field site (see extended Acknowledgments in SI Appendix) and Hazel Markus and Ann Taves. This material is based on work supported by John Templeton Foundation Grant 55427. K.W. was also supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (DGE-114747) and a William R. & Sara Hart Kimball Stanford Graduate Fellowship.
PY - 2021/2/2
Y1 - 2021/2/2
N2 - Hearing the voice of God, feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a demonic spirit—such events are among the most remarkable human sensory experiences. They change lives and in turn shape history. Why do some people report experiencing such events while others do not? We argue that experiences of spiritual presence are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as “porous,” or permeable to the world, and by an immersive orientation toward inner life that allows a person to become “absorbed” in experiences. In four studies with over 2,000 participants from many religious traditions in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, porosity and absorption played distinct roles in determining which people, in which cultural settings, were most likely to report vivid sensory experiences of what they took to be gods and spirits.
AB - Hearing the voice of God, feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a demonic spirit—such events are among the most remarkable human sensory experiences. They change lives and in turn shape history. Why do some people report experiencing such events while others do not? We argue that experiences of spiritual presence are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as “porous,” or permeable to the world, and by an immersive orientation toward inner life that allows a person to become “absorbed” in experiences. In four studies with over 2,000 participants from many religious traditions in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, porosity and absorption played distinct roles in determining which people, in which cultural settings, were most likely to report vivid sensory experiences of what they took to be gods and spirits.
KW - religion
KW - porosity
KW - absorption
KW - spiritual experience
KW - voices
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.2016649118
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2016649118
M3 - Article
VL - 118
JO - PNAS
JF - PNAS
SN - 0027-8424
IS - 5
M1 - e2016649118
ER -