Religious Experience or Psychopathology? A Feature-Based Approach to the Comparative Study

of “Nonordinary” Experiences

Ann Taves *

Department of Religious Studies

University of California at Santa Barbara

[email protected]

Michael Barlev

Department of Psychology

Arizona State University

[email protected]

Michael Kinsella

Department of Religious Studies

University of California at Santa Barbara

[email protected]

Author Contributions. AT and MB outlined the manuscript. AT drafted the manuscript, with extensive edits by MB. AT, MB, and MK conceived of and developed the INOE. MB collected and analyzed the INOE data presented here. All authors approved the manuscript for submission.

Acknowledgements. The authors thank Elliott Ihm for reviewing the conceptual structure and preventing some missteps, Maharshi Vyas for help in interpreting the Indian data, and Pascal Boyer and Kathy Johnson for feedback on an earlier draft.

1 Funding Statement. The writing of this manuscript was supported by John Templeton Foundation grant #61187 and by a subgrant funded by John Templeton Foundation grant #35279 awarded to AT, MB, and MK.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests. The authors declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Open Practices. All data and analysis scripts have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework at INOE Project. The design and analysis plans were not preregistered.

* Correspondence should be addressed to Ann Taves, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. [email protected]

2 ABSTRACT LONG (227/250)

At the turn of the 20th century, researchers compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits. In doing so, researchers recognized the phenomenological overlap between the experiences reported by their subjects: alterations in the sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to “nonordinary experiences” (NOEs) was never fully realized: disciplinary siloing, categorical distinctions such as between “religious” and “psychopathological” experiences, and the challenges involved in comparing culture-laden first-person accounts all limited such efforts. Here, we argue for a renewed feature-based approach for mapping the universality and diversity of NOEs across cultures and investigating the ways in which culture and experiences interact. To do so, we argue that researchers must solve two problems: (1) how to query experiences without eliminating the culture, and (2) how to query experiences when the ordinary-nonordinary distinction itself may be culture-dependent. We introduce a survey —the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE)—that addresses these problems by separating the phenomenological features of a wide- range of experiences from the claims made about them, and then querying both the features and claims. We demonstrate how this approach enables us to investigate a few ways in which culture shapes experiences and make inferences regarding the reasons why experiences stand out for people. We conclude by highlighting future directions for the comparative study of NOEs across cultures.

ABSTRACT SHORT (96/100)

To investigate the interaction between culture and experiences at the population level, researchers must query experiences across cultures without eliminating the culture, and query experiences when what stands out to people as nonordinary may itself be culture-dependent. The solution, we argue, is separating the phenomenological features of a wide-range of experiences from claims made about them and querying both features and claims. We implement this features-based approach to comparing experiences across cultures in a new survey that enables us to investigate ways in which culture shapes experiences and infer reasons why experiences stand out for people.

KEYWORDS: Religious Experiences; Nonordinary Experiences; Psychopathology; Culture; Cross-Cultural Comparison

3 1. Theory

1.1. Introduction

In The Dissociation of a Personality (Prince 1905/1978), neurologist Morton Prince recounted his patient’s description of an experience in which it seemed as if there was another self in her body.1

[Christine Beauchamp], in a depressed, despondent, rather angry frame of mind, was

looking at herself in the mirror. … Suddenly she saw, notwithstanding the seriousness of

her thoughts, a curious, laughing expression—a regular diabolical smile—come over her

face. It was not her own expression, but one that she had never seen before. It seemed to

her devilish, diabolical, and uncanny, entirely out of keeping with her thoughts. … a

feeling of horror came over her at what she saw. … She saw herself as another person in

the mirror. ... It suddenly occurred to her to talk to this ‘thing,’ to this ‘other person,’ in

the mirror; to put questions to ‘it.’ So she began, but she got no answer. Then she realized

that the method was absurd, and that it was impossible for her to speak and answer at the

same time. Thereupon she suggested to the ‘thing’ that it should write answers to her

questions. (Ibid., pp. 360-363.)

Prince (1905/1978, pp. 361-363) presents the written answers offered by the “thing,” whom

Prince knew as an alter named “Sally,” to which Beauchamp had added her spoken questions.

1 Christine Beauchamp was a pseudonym for Clara Fowler, a college student who, according to Prince, developed three main “personalities”: BI (“the saint”), BIII (“Sally”), and BIV (“the realist”). BII was Prince’s name for BI when hypnotized. This incident was recounted to Prince by BIV (for more on Fowler, see Rosenzweig 1987, 1988).

For more on Prince, see Hale 1971, pp. 116-132; Gauld 1992, pp. 410-416; Kelly et al. 2007, pp. 301-365.

4 The dialogue opened with Beauchamp asking “Who are you?” to which Sally responded “A spirit.”

Although Sally referred to herself as a spirit, Prince—based on their many previous exchanges— thought that Sally was simply pretending to be a spirit when she actually knew she was part of the patient (i.e., Beauchamp) as a whole. Although Prince viewed this “remarkable experience” as the result of “subconscious mental action,” he was fully aware that Beauchamp’s experience would have been viewed as “demonic possession”—a religious experience—in an earlier time.

Richard Hodgson, who assisted Prince with Beauchamp’s care, approached Beauchamp as a potential medium, whom he could study in the way he had been studying the self-identified medium Leonora Piper for over a decade. In his study of Mrs. Piper, conducted at the behest of the American Society for Psychical Research, Hodgson investigated her claim that she was able to communicate with the spirits of the dead. In approaching Beauchamp in this way, Hodgson offered a third way of framing alterations in sense of self: as potential evidence of extraordinary abilities rather than simply as a sign of mental illness or the presence of a demon or deity.2

As researchers and clinicians generally recognize, experiences that some consider religious or spiritual, others view as extraordinary (psychical, paranormal, anomalous, or exceptional), and yet others view as evidence of psychopathology (Figure 1; see Supplement S1 for more details).

Alterations in the sense of self can be understood as possession by demons, spirits, or deities; the

2 On this interaction between Prince and Hodgson, which will be discussed further below, see Blum, 2006, 217-225;

Kenny, 1981; Oppenheim, 1988, 375-376.

5 exceptional abilities associated with spiritualist mediums; or as dissociative disorders.

Involuntary bodily movements, such as speaking in tongues or automatic writing, are associated with possession by the Holy Spirit or spirits of the deceased, mediumistic channeling, and conversion disorders. Seeing visions of heavenly realms, hearing the voice of a deity, and perception-like experiences via non-sensory means (ESP) meet core criteria for hallucinations. In short, phenomenologically similar experiences can be interpreted in light of drastically different cultural schemas, and also, based on those interpretations, viewed as evidence of mental illness, extraordinary abilities, or religious or spiritual realities.3

3 We note, too, that religious believers commonly acknowledge alternative explanations for their valued experiences or those of revered figures that founded their religious traditions, if only to discount them (Taves, 1999). We can even find these acknowledgments embedded in their scriptures. Thus, we learn from the Qur’an, for example, that unbelievers claimed Muhammad was a poet, a soothsayer, or a liar (Sura 26:38-42). We learn from the New

Testament that when the crowds heard Jesus' followers speaking in tongues, they were “bewildered” and Peter had to explain that they were “not drunk, as you suppose,” but “filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:1-15). We also learn that the apostle Paul prepared the congregation at Corinth for the nonbelievers who would say they were “out of

[their] mind,” if they heard them speaking in tongues (1 Cor 14:23). Although believers recognize alternative explanations and make tacit comparisons, they generally do so from a theological rather than a scientific vantage point.

6

Figure 1. Examples of the phenomenological overlap in experiences interpreted as religious or spiritual, extraordinary (i.e., psychical, paranormal, anomalous, or exceptional), and psychiatric by researchers and subjects. Note that there are both broad and narrow definitions of “mystical experiences”; narrowly defined as an experience of undifferentiated unity, it can be interpreted as ego dissolution (see Taves, 2020)b. Note also that there is overlap between the experiences listed here. For example, an out-of-body experience is a common feature of a near-death experience, and automatic writing and speaking in tongues commonly occur alongside alterations in the sense of self as during spirit possession. See Supplement S1 for more details. Diagram adapted from Taves, 2020a.

7 Although researchers and psychiatrists generally recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects or patients recount, the role of culture—collectively held beliefs and practices4 —in producing this variation has not been adequately explored. The lack of attention to the interaction between culture and experiences is due both to the lingering effects of focusing on experiences for their evidentiary value, and to theoretical difficulties that researchers interested in cross-cultural comparisons have been unable to overcome. Our focus here is on introducing a features-based approach for comparing experiences that researchers and subjects

(mostly in Western societies) interpret via claims-laden constructs such as religious or spiritual, extraordinary (anomalous, paranormal, or exceptional), or psychopathological. We query a wide range of experiences that might stand out to people or be marked by them as special

(Dissanayake 1988; Keane 2010; Taves 2009) relative to what they consider ordinary or everyday. We use the term “nonordinary experiences” (NOEs) as a relatively neutral and less history-laden term to refer to this constellation of experiences.

4 Theoretically, we are expanding on Durkheim’s approach to small scale societies, such that we can conceive of groups such as religious traditions as “moral communities” that “adhere to … beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden” (Durkheim 1912/1995, 44). In doing so, we do not refer to sacred things, which as Durkheim pointed out could be any thing (p. 35). Instead we are generalizing his idea of

“things set apart” to encompass whatever “things [are] marked as worthy of special attention” in keeping with

Keane’s discussion of “marking,” Dissanayake’s discussion of “making things special” (1998, 98-101 and Taves’s discussion of “special things and things set apart” (2009, 28-47). Finally, although we are using “culture” somewhat loosely to refer to the “beliefs and practices” of groups, we view our use as compatible with the “middle-range” definition of culture in terms of “patterned practice” that Roepstorff et al. (2010) advocate.

8 Here we argue that our ability to compare experiences across cultures has been limited by two major theoretical hurdles. First, the investigation of experiences across cultures relies on first- person accounts of lived experiences. These accounts blend phenomenological features (e.g., what people sensed, what the experience felt like) with appraisals (i.e., assessments) of what was happening both as it occurred and upon later reflection. Appraisals draw on cultural schemas and cultural frames that allow people to describe and categorize their experiences. These elements – the phenomenological features, the appraisals, and the available categories for classifying experiences – can be mixed and matched in many different ways. As a result, experiences that are recounted and classified differently may share phenomenological features and, conversely, phenomenologically distinct features may be viewed as evidence for a shared appraisal or classification.

Second, researchers have typically emphasized either a shared component (e.g., a common feature or common claim) or the culture-specific lived experience as a whole in their research design. Researchers in the sciences tend to emphasize the components, whereas researchers in cultural anthropology and religious studies tend to privilege the culture-specific lived experience.

There are limitations to both. If we privilege the feature, we risk losing sight not only of lived experiences, but also the profound ways in which culture shapes experience. If we privilege the common claims, we risk losing sight of the generic features. If we privilege the culture-specific lived experience, we undercut our ability to compare experiences across cultures.

We argue that the solution to these problems is, first, to separate experiences, described phenomenologically, from how they are appraised by subjects and, second, to query both in

9 order to see how they interact. We conceptualize experiences as events and use research on event cognition to identify components (i.e. phenomenological features and cultural schemas) that interact to generate lived experiences (Hohwy et al., 2020; Radvansky & Zacks, 2014; Taves &

Asprem, 2017). A few scholars have suggested the importance of separating experiences from appraisals in surveys of experiences (Brett et al., 2007; Irwin et al., 2013; Kohls & Walach,

2006). We applaud these efforts and have drawn inspiration from them in developing a survey specifically designed to compare experiences across cultures—the Inventory of Nonordinary

Experiences (INOE: Taves et al., In preparation).

Comparing NOEs across societies is especially important, since it is only through such comparisons that researchers can see the extent to which their own culture has shaped their expectations about what is ordinary or nonordinary. In what follows, we discuss several ways in which culture shapes experiences. When people valorize and actively cultivate experiences, this can turn ordinary experiences into nonordinary ones; this can also make relatively rare experiences much more common. When people disparage or pathologize experiences, they may attend to, remember, and/or report those experiences less commonly. Finally, culture can normalize experiences, which can make experiences that are deemed highly distressing in some societies much less distressing in others, thus suggesting important clinical implications. We additionally review ways in which experiences shape cultures and have even shaped human history. When investigating possible interactions between culture and experiences, researchers should be careful not to impose Western categories on the experiences of interest, since we do not know if these categories are cross-culturally stable across cultures. Nor, as Maraldi &

Krippner (2019) point out, do we know if the ordinary-nonordinary distinction is cross-culturally

10 stable; for that reason, we encourage researchers to survey a wide range of experiences that might stand out for people. If, as we suspect, people have the ability to make many experiences stand out, we must avoid essentializing or reifying the concept of “nonordinary experiences” as if it were a fixed and stable set of experiences.

In the next two sections of Part 1 we review promising aspects of the comparative approach that emerged at the turn of the last century, while highlighting the lack of attention paid to the ways culture shape experiences (Section 2) and the limited progress since that time (Section 3). We then build on that foundation to develop a feature-based approach that allows researchers to compare experiences that people might consider nonordinary across cultures (Section 4). In Part

2, we explain how this feature-based approach is implemented in a new survey—the Inventory of

Nonordinary Experiences (INOE) (Section 1), demonstrate the usefulness of the INOE using several illustrative examples of the interaction of culture and experiences in the U.S. and India

(Section 2), and discuss the further work needed to validate the central premises of the INOE

(Section 3). As a whole, we provide conceptual and methodological tools that allow researchers to extend the feature-based approach from individual case studies and ethnographic fieldwork to populations. As such, researchers can investigate the universality and diversity of experiences that people across societies might consider nonordinary, and test hypotheses about the ways in which cultures and experiences interact.

1.2. The Comparative Approach at the Turn of the 20th Century

Toward the end of the 19th century, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) began studying subjects who, the SPR thought, may offer empirical evidence of phenomena not yet recognized

11 by the science of the day. The SPR, founded in 1882 by a mixed group of researchers and

Spiritualists, focused on spiritualist mediums who claimed to communicate with the spirits of the deceased (Gauld, 1968).

Faced with the longstanding choice between medical and religious interpretations of alterations in the sense of self, researchers associated with the SPR advanced a third option. Instead of viewing alterations in the sense of self as either psychopathological or religious, they viewed them as a means for investigating the existence of unusual abilities and the truth of extraordinary claims, such as human survival of bodily death. The SPR thus became a site from which to investigate and compare experiences that researchers viewed as potentially abnormal, normal, or supranormal5 or, in contemporary terms, as psychopathological, ordinary, or extraordinary.

When Morton Prince enlisted Richard Hodgson to assist him with Christine Beauchamp’s care,

Hodgson apparently approached Beauchamp as a psychical researcher rather than as a clinician.

Hodgson wrote letters to Sally and conducted experiments, presumably to test whether Sally— with her distinctive knowledge and personality—was more than a product of Beauchamp’s subconscious.6

5 Frederic Myers, whom James viewed as the SPR’s chief theorist, first formulated this distinction in 1885 and elaborated it in his discussion of subliminal consciousness in 1892 (Myers 1885, 1892); for an extended discussion, see Kelly et al. 2007, chapter 2, especially pp. 80-86.

6 In a letter to Prince dated February 20, 1900, Sally reported that “[she] can’t seem to keep out of hot water with anyone but Dicky [her nickname for Hodgson],” and that she wanted to tell Prince about “Dicky’s letters and experiments” (Prince 1905/1978, p. 358).

12 At the point when Hodgson got involved with Beauchamp, he had already been investigating

Leonora Piper, a self-described spiritualist medium, at the behest of the American Society for

Psychical Research for over a decade. SPR members who attended sittings with Mrs. Piper differed sharply in their evaluations of the evidence. William James, who discovered her in 1885, came to “believe her to be in possession of a power not yet explained” (Gauld 1968, 253-266).

Hodgson eventually concluded that spirits really were speaking through her and began to lead his life in accordance with their teachings (ibid.). Prince, however, felt Mrs. Piper “wrecked”

Hodgson’s mind, and he ultimately shut Hodgson off from further experiments on Sally (Blum,

2006, 217-225; Kenny, 1981; Oppenheim, 1988, 375-376). Prince may have feared that Hodgson might try to convince Beauchamp that she had mediumistic abilities instead of supporting his clinical interpretation and therapeutic aims.

The questions swirling around Mrs. Piper were part of a larger intellectual conversation taking place within a transatlantic network of clinicians, psychologists, and psychical researchers who were interested in alterations and divisions in the sense of self, such as those reported by

Christine Beauchamp and Leonora Piper. Their research agenda, dubbed the “experimental psychology of the subconscious” by historian Eugene Taylor (1984, 1996), was grounded in the clinically-oriented French psychological tradition exemplified in the work of the Pierre Janet

(Nicolas 2002, pp. 145-153). Janet, professor of experimental psychology at the Collège de

France, focused on clinical cases of “hysteria” that involved the alternation of “personalities'' and used hypnosis and “automatic writing” to reveal the “fixed ideas” of subordinated aspects of the self that were causing distress (Ellenberger 2006, pp. 331-417; Gauld 1992, 369-400). William

James and the Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy, as well as others associated with the SPR,

13 extended the case study method to investigate spiritualist mediums who claimed to be in touch with discarnate spirits. Together, psychologists, including Janet, James, and Flournoy, and psychical researchers, such as Hodgson, Frederic Myers, and Eleanor and Henry Sidgwick, constituted a network that was well-represented at the earliest International Congresses of

Experimental Psychology (Brower 2010; Hamilton 2010; Sommer 2011; E. Taylor 1996).

Although all these researchers compared individuals who experienced alterations and/or divisions in their sense of self, they had different agendas in doing so. The clinically-oriented psychologists, such as Janet and Prince, were generally interested in treating psychological disorders. Psychologists more closely aligned with the SPR studied spiritualist mediums to determine if they could be understood in conventional psychological terms or if they offered evidence for extraordinary abilities or claims. Both Flournoy’s landmark study of the medium

Hélène Smith (Flournoy 1900/1994) and Eleanor Sidgwick’s study of Mrs. Piper (1915) accounted for their experiences in conventional psychological terms. James and Frederick

Myers, who James viewed as the SPR’s leading theoretician, both argued for “something More” that potentially challenged the boundaries of conventional science (James 1986; Knapp 2017;

Taves 2009b). Whatever their views on the limits of science, psychologists who investigated such phenomena in the general population, such as James and Flournoy, were convinced, as many of the clinicians were not, that alterations and/or divisions in the sense of self and related experiences were not inherently psychopathological (Taves 2014, pp. 291-292).

The emergent comparative approach pioneered at the turn of the 20th century was never fully realized, however. Although these researchers recognized that their subjects made dramatically

14 different claims about experiences with phenomenologically similar features, their focus was on the evidential implications of the experiences, that is, on whether they offered evidence of mental illness, extraordinary abilities, or religious or spiritual worldviews. Although Flournoy and

Sidgwick did attend to the role of Spiritualist beliefs and practices in the emergence of claims about mediumistic abilities, this did not lead to widespread interest among members of the SPR in the impact of culture on experiences (Taves 2014). By the early 1900s, the emergent comparative approach was largely overcome by disciplinary sub-specializations within psychology that simultaneously hardened the boundary between the psychological study of psychopathological and religious experiences, and rejected the study of psychical phenomena

(and by extension mediums) as unscientific (Coon 1992; Sommer 2012).

1.3. The Comparative Approach Today

With some notable exceptions, e.g., Clarke, 2001, 2010; Kirmayer, 2005; Kirmayer & Ryder,

2016; Luhrmann, 2011, 2016; McCauley & Graham, 2019), psychiatrists and scholars of religion have maintained a disciplinary focus on researcher-defined constructs that enabled them to avoid comparing experiences across cultures despite their phenomenological overlap. Psychiatrists and other clinicians generally focus on distressing experiences and view features of experiences as symptoms of mental disorders. In religious studies and the psychology of religion, researchers tend to focus on religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences (for overviews, see Astley 2020;

Moser & Meister 2020; Taves 2020a).

Over time, the various editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have come to acknowledge the overlap between

15 religious and psychopathological experiences. The DSM-3R (American Psychiatric Association

1987) indicated that “hallucinations occurring in the course of an intensely shared religious experience generally have no pathological significance” (p. 398). Under pressure from psychiatric anthropologists and cultural psychiatrists (Lewis-Fernandez 1998; Littlewood 1992), the DSM-4 (American Psychiatric Association 1994) extended such caveats to Conversion

Disorders (p. 455) and Dissociative Disorders, indicating with respect to the latter that “a cross- cultural perspective is particularly important in the evaluation Dissociative Disorders because dissociative states are a common and accepted expression of cultural activities or religious experience in many societies'' (p. 477). The DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013, p.

14; Lewis-Fernández & Aggarwal 2013)—recognizing that diagnosis and culture are deeply intertwined—acknowledged that “mental disorders are defined in relation to cultural, social, and familial norms and values.” The DSM, however, does not attempt to explain the phenomenological overlap between experiences nor why phenomenologically similar experiences are distressing in some cases but not in others.

Nor has the interaction between culture and experiences been the focus in psychological subfields, such as cultural psychology or transpersonal and anomalistic psychology. Cultural psychologists have not focused attention on nonordinary experiences, whereas transpersonal and anomalistic psychologists, the present-day heirs of the psychical researchers and parapsychologists, have not focused on culture. As Palmer & Hastings (2013) observe, the transpersonal psychologists are primarily interested in the effects that exceptional experiences have on people’s lives, while the anomalous psychologists are primarily interested in the possible

16 evidential value of experiences (French & Stone 2014; Braude 2003; Friedman & Hartelius

2015; Kelly et al. 2007).

Anthropologists, by way of contrast, have a longstanding interest in the interplay between culture and the experiential phenomena associated with trance, spirit possession, and shamanism reported in many small scale societies (Boddy, 1994; Eliade, 1972; Lambek, 1989, 1996; Lewis,

1971; Vitebsky, 2001; Winkelman, 1986). Both anthropologists and psychologists have sought to understand the relationship between spirit possession and dissociative identity disorder (Cardeña et al., 2009; Cardeña & Alvarado, 2014; Cohen & Barrett, 2008; Maraldi, 2017; Moreira-

Almeida & Cardeña, 2011; Seligman & Kirmayer, 2008; Spanos, 1994). Anthropologists have also focused on the interpretive processes that shape how people understand their experiences

(Harris 2007; Turner & Bruner 1986), including their own extraordinary experiences while doing fieldwork (Goulet & Young 1994; Hunter 2018, 2019; Meintel et al. 2020). Although cultural anthropologists and some culturally-oriented psychologists, psychiatrists, and religious studies scholars have continued to make cross cultural comparisons, they typically do so based on individual-level case studies and ethnographic fieldwork. Although this allows these researchers to generate hypotheses that point to the importance of culture in shaping experiences, as yet we cannot test these hypotheses at the population level.

The cross-cultural study of experiences that stand out for people relative to what they consider ordinary or everyday (i.e., experiences deemed nonordinary) must thus make several moves.

First, it must be feature-based: it must separate the phenomenological features of experiences from claims made about them—whether by researchers or subjects. Second, it must query both

17 features and claims in order to see how they interact. Third, it must include a wide range of experiences that people might consider nonordinary.

At the turn of the last century, researchers interested in studying alterations and divisions in the sense of self initiated the first move, but they did not carry through with the second and third.

Their efforts were derailed by the quest for “White Crows” (experiences that challenged

“conventional science” [Moore, 1977]) and undercut by the emergence of disciplinary subspecialties that essentialized their objects of study as, for example, mental disorders and religious experiences. Researchers interested in cross cultural comparison struggled with the tension between the general features of experiences and their local instantiations, privileging one or the other. If we adopt the feature-based approach advanced here, however, we can compare experiences across cultures using their shared phenomenological features, without losing sight of the wide range of experiences that may stand out for people in some cultures but not others.

1.4. A Feature-Based Approach for Comparing Lived Experiences Across Cultures

1.4.1. Lived Experiences and Shared Features

When researchers compare self-reported experiences, they are doing so based on a feature that is shared by two or more lived experiences (Poole 1986). Here, we use “lived experiences” to emphasize that first-person accounts are laden with claims: they are interpreted in real-time, reconstructed and reinterpreted after the fact, and situated relative to culture-specific interpretive frameworks. Our focus is not on lived experience in the abstract but on specific lived experiences. Whereas the former (abstract use) refers to the flow of information in so far as the perceiver is aware of it, the latter (specific use) refers to discrete events that have been carved out

18 of the flow of information (Taves & Asprem 2017). NOEs thus are personally experienced (i.e., lived) events that stand out for people as salient or memorable. In making comparisons, we need to be careful not to equate the claims-laden lived experiences as reported by subjects with the generic feature or features that their lived experiences may share with those of others. Similarly, it is important not to confuse the possible stability of the generic features with the instability of lived experiences, since people often reflect on and reinterpret such experiences many times throughout their lives.

We can frame the distinction between lived experiences and common features via research on event cognition. An “event” is “a segment of time at a given location that is conceived by an observer to have a beginning and an end” (Zacks & Tversky 2001, p. 3). People process the flow of information from their bodies and their environment by simultaneously segmenting it into events, and generating working models of what is happening based on event schemas (such as attending a séance in which a medium channels spirits or going to a psychiatrist due to mental distress), which may largely be culturally-shaped (Asprem & Taves in press; Taves & Asprem

2017). A working model typically includes relevant entities such as agents, the relations between them, and the place and time in which the event occurs, mapped from the point of view of the subject (Radvansky & Zacks 2014, pp. 25-28). Mental representations of events (i.e., lived experiences) typically also include relevant internal sensations and feelings (Critchley &

Garfinkel 2017; Seth et al. 2011; Taves & Asprem 2017). A person’s working model of an event focuses attention on those aspects of their internal and external environment that seem relevant to them (given their event schema). Consequently, culturally-infused schemas direct people’s attention to features of their internal and external environments, which may make those features

19 stand out for them. Cultural schemas thus cause things to stand out for people that others, in the absence of that schema, might not even notice.

When we compare lived experiences, we do so based on a feature or features they share. A given event, however, is composed of many features. See Table 1 and Figure 2.

Table 1. The lived experiences of Christine Beauchamp and Leonora Piper broken down into some of their phenomenological features and claims.

20 Figure 2. Artistic depictions of the lived experiences of Christine Beauchamp (left) and Leonora

Piper (right).

Returning to the case study of Beauchamp, we can compare her lived experience as a patient with Mrs. Piper’s lived experience as a spiritualist medium. The common feature—and the basis for our comparison—is the sense that another self was sometimes present in their body and able to communicate via automatic writing. In both cases, this was presumably premised on an altered internal sense of agency (Taves 2006). However, this common feature is only one aspect of their respective lived experiences. A more complete description would include an indication of the times and places in which the experiences occurred, the mental state each was in during their experience, who else was present, what each was doing, and what the experience felt like. Mrs.

Piper had her experience during séances, surrounded by people who expected “her” to be displaced by a “spirit” with whom they could engage directly through speech or automatic writing (E. Sidgwick 1915, 8-17). Beauchamp had her experience at home in front of a mirror, at which point she realized she could ask “it” questions and “it” could respond via automatic writing.

1.4.2. Cultural interpretive frameworks

When people segment the flow of information into events, schemas provide the “scaffolding” that structures the event components to generate a working model of what is happening.

Although event schemas are likely built on top of reliably developing and universally-shared templates (Carey, 2009; Tooby & Cosmides, 2008), they are also to a large extent culturally- shaped and therefore can vary between populations. Although schemas go by different names in

21 different disciplines and research traditions (Bennardo & De Munck, 2014, pp. 37-56), researchers generally assume that they are nested in layers from simple behavioral schemas to complex networks of concepts: a simple behavioral schema, such as attending a séance, relies on a complex network of concepts, such as the belief that humans survive death and can communicate with the living through “mediums.”

Cultural framework theories allude to this wider set of relations. As conceptualized by Bang et al. (2007), “cultural framework theories provide individuals with skeletal principles for meaning making, including beliefs about what sorts of things are relevant, worthy of attention and in need of explanation.” In addition, as Bender (2019, p. 6) indicates, they contain representations of causal structure and thus invite inferences regarding cause-effect relations. Cultural frames thus not only allow people to predict what is happening, they also provide a basis for making inferences about why it happened.

As confirmed by behavioral and neuroimaging studies, cultural frameworks shape what we attend to during an event, how an event is interpreted in real-time, and how an event is reconstructed after the fact (Anderson et al. 1977; Bransford & Johnson 1972). In fact, even in highly controlled settings where people are presented with the exact same event, differing expectations cause dramatic differences in how the event is interpreted (e.g., Yeshurun et al.

2017). As a result of cultural differences, people may thus have different frameworks for determining what events are worthy of attention, principles for making sense of events as they occur, and expectations regarding the kinds of events that can occur to begin with.

22 Cultural frames embed expectations about the nature of the world—the agents and objects it contains and the causal relations between them—as well as about the nature of the self and its relation to others (Cassaniti & Luhrmann 2014; Markus & Kitayama 1991, 2010; Proust &

Fortier 2018). These expectations are carried not only by religious and spiritual traditions, such as Protestant Christianity in the U.S., Hinduism in India, Confucianism in China, and traditional religions in Africa, but also by healing traditions, whether the medical traditions widespread in the Western world or traditional folk medicine. In the case of Beauchamp and Mrs. Piper,

Morton Prince viewed Beauchamp as a “fragmented self”, as did Sally, the part of Beauchamp with knowledge of all the other parts. Mrs. Piper and most who attended her séances viewed her as a spiritualist medium: a person with a permeable self, through whom discarnate spirits of dead people could speak. As was the case with dissociated patients and spiritualist mediums in turn- of-the-century Boston, multiple interpretive frames can coexist within a given society (Legare &

Gelman 2008; Legare & Shtulman 2018; Shtulman & Legare 2019) and even within an individual (e.g., Barlev et al. 2017, 2018, 2019).

Cultural frames shape expectations. In the case of Spiritualists, their cultural frame not only shaped their expectations regarding the existence of spirits of the dead and the desire of these spirits to communicate with the living, but also their expectations regarding when, where, and how spirits would do so—through mediums at séances. Other cultural frames generate different expectations regarding spirits of the dead and other unseen presences. In sub-Saharan Africa, people expect that ancestors will interact with them in dreams (Kiernan 1985; Olupona 2014). In

Sufi mystical traditions, dreams are regarded as a source of divinely-inspired insights and even revelation; although among Muslims who rely on the authority of the Qur’an and Sunnah alone,

23 such claims are regarded as superstitious (Mittermaier 2011). In India, adherents of popular

Hindu traditions expect that deities and spirits could possess people (F. M. Smith 2006) and animate statues and other physical objects (Eck 1998). In Native American traditions, spiritual presences tend to be associated with special places such as mountains, trees, and rivers (Basso

1996). In Europe, Catholic teachings and devotional practices led to widespread expectation that

Jesus was really present in the communion wafer and that the Virgin Mary could appear as an apparition and interact with ordinary people (Zimdars-Swartz 1991). In contrast, Protestant

Christianity rejected such claims as superstitious and, in societies such as the U.S. with its historical roots in Protestantism, the sense of divine presence is often limited to mental or bodily sensations that the subject feels are not their own (Luhrmann 2012; Mould 2011).

1.4.3. How Culture Shapes Experiences

As a species, humans are unique in their dependence on socially transmitted culture (Henrich,

2016; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). We not only are born into culturally distinct ways of life, we participate in a range of subcultural groups and traditions with their own distinctive beliefs and practices that can lead us to value and cultivate or disparage and pathologize experiences. In complex societies, some subcultural groups tend to dominate and thus disproportionately influence others. The layers of belief and practice that make up our “culture” shape our lived experiences. As such, they have the potential to make experiences seem more or less ordinary and, thus, to influence the likelihood that people will notice, remember, and recount those experiences. People do this by: (1) marking particular experiences and the situations in which they are thought to occur as worthy of special attention (Keane 2010), (2) encouraging people to actively cultivate certain experiences, and (3) discounting the markings that people attach to

24 certain experiences. We consider each of these ways in which culture shapes experiences in more depth. We additionally show (4) how culture shapes the extent to which experiences are viewed as distressing, which highlights a clinical implication of the framework outlined here.

(1) When cultures mark experiences and the situations in which they are thought to occur as worthy of special attention they can turn ordinary experiences into nonordinary ones. Latter-day

Saints (LDS) believe that God continues to offer revelation for the entire Church through its presidents (who—like the Church’s founder Joseph Smith—are considered prophets), and to offer personal revelation to the Church’s faithful. When in 1997 then-LDS president Gordon B.

Hinckley was asked how he receives divine revelation, he responded that it comes in a “still, small voice”:

Usually no voice of any kind, but just a perception in the mind. I liken it to Elijah's

experience. When he sought the Lord, there was a great wind, and the Lord was not in the

wind. And there was an earthquake, and the Lord was not in the earthquake. And a fire,

and the Lord was not in the fire. But in a still, small voice. Now that's the way it works.

(Lattin 1997; see also Mould 2011)

According to anthropologist Tom Mould, both ordinary believers and the Church’s prophet experience the “voice”—as Hinkley did—in their mind or heart, not as coming from an external source. The “still, small voice” designates a thought or feeling that stands out from other thoughts or feelings, according to Mould, because it arrives suddenly or with unusual force

(Mould 2011, pp. 46, 195-197). Although others may also notice thoughts and feelings that arise suddenly or forcefully, LDS mark them as potential signs of revelation. This dramatically

25 heightens the potential import of such thoughts and feelings and encourages LDS to watch for them.

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (2012) found something similar among evangelical Protestants who attend charismatic churches where they are taught to hear God’s voice. According to

Luhrmann, such Christians expect that thoughts and feelings that arise when reading the Bible, dreaming, or in the midst of ordinary activities might be signs that God is speaking to them. Like

LDS, they too think that sudden or unexpected thoughts and feelings are more likely to come from God than those that seem routine and predictable. Both groups “test” such thoughts and feelings to determine if they are authentic revelations: authentic revelation should be in keeping with what they expect God to say, should be confirmed by others in their religious tradition, and should bring a feeling of peace or resolution (Luhrmann 2012, pp. 56-65).

(2) When people are encouraged to seek certain experiences and to actively cultivate them via practices, experiences that might generally be quite rare may become more common. In many traditional societies, people believe that the soul can leave the body when dreaming. In such societies, trance is typically understood as a form of controlled dreaming that enables the soul to leave the body and journey to otherworldly realms inhabited by spirits. Anthropologist Piers

Vitebsky (2001) characterizes this as a key feature of the shamanic worldview and, like Eliade,

(1972) defines “shamans” as those who by virtue of skill and training have experiences in which it seems as if they leave their physical bodies and enter realities other than the one they usually inhabit. Contemporary Western spiritual teachers also encourage ordinary practitioners to seek such experiences. For many years, Michael Harner, anthropologist and self-described “white

26 shaman,” conducted workshops on “core shamanism” in which he taught ordinary Americans how to journey to other worlds (Harner 1990). We expect that people who receive training in these practices would be more likely to have otherwise relatively rare experiences.

Religious traditions commonly encourage practitioners to engage in practices—such as visualization, meditation, prayer, singing, chanting, dance, and/or psychoactive drug use—in the context of rituals that they claim lead to valued experiences. Here, too, we would expect that those who engage in such practices would have the valued experiences more often (Roepstorff et al. 2010). When people regularly engage in visualization practices in which they cultivate mental images (e.g., of sacred scenes, objects, or symbols), these images may become more vivid and realistic (Asprem 2017; Luhrmann & Morgain 2012; Noll et al. 1985). Long-term meditators can induce experiences, such as compassion, that produce short-and long-term neural changes (Lutz et al. 2008, 2009). When people move or vocalize synchronously it can lead to an experience of entrainment, in which the boundaries between the individual and the group blur, and which can generate a sense of unity or oneness (Clayton et al. 2004; Fischer et al. 2013; Jackson et al. 2018;

Reddish et al. 2016; Wood et al. 2018). Psychoactive drugs typically produce NOEs, such as a sense of leaving one’s body, perceiving and communicating with extraordinary beings, and ego dissolution (Letheby & Gerrans 2017; Millière et al. 2018; Taves 2020b; Timmermann et al.

2018). Indeed, intensive users and participants in traditions that incorporate psychoactive substances, such as peyote and ayahuasca, in their rituals report a much higher incidence of such otherwise very rare experiences (Alverga 2010; Dawson 2013; Maroukis 2012; McKenna &

Riba 2016; Stewart 1993).

27 (3) When cultures disparage experiences, people may be less likely to attend to them or remember them when they occur; when cultures pathologize experiences, people may be more reluctant to report them. Cultural traditions not only valorize some experiences, they actively disparage others. Protestants rejected Catholic claims regarding the real presence of Christ in the communion wafer and appearances of the Virgin Mary to the faithful. Many Protestant traditions also rejected Catholic claims regarding visions, voices, and miraculous healings. In doing so, they dramatically narrowed the range of experiences that they considered religiously and spiritually significant. Protestant church leaders sought to suppress such experiences and, in doing so, often offered alternative explanations, such as ignorance, delusion, and illness (Taves

1999). Some experiences, such as sudden healings, were secularized and normalized. Others, such as visions and voices, were pathologized. Still others, such as sleep paralysis, initially went unexplained. As anthropologist David Hufford reported, many, fearing that their episodes of sleep paralysis were signs of mental illness, were reluctant to report them (Hufford 1982).

When people disparage certain experiences or deem them less worthy of attention, they may be less likely to notice those experiences when they occur or remember them. Some people, like

New Age spiritualists, attend to so-called “meaningful coincidences” and even cultivate the ability to identify subtle coincidences or notice coincidences more often; others, such those affiliated with traditional religions, may be surprised by coincidences, spend some time thinking about what they might portend, and may occasionally interpret them within the framework of their tradition; and yet others, such as atheists and agnostics, may actively disparage the belief that coincidences can be “meaningful” and deliberately ignore them.

28 4) The profound ways in which culture shapes experiences may mean that the extent to which experiences are viewed as distressing may itself be culture-dependent. William James suggested that within the general population religious innovators were particularly prone to “mental instability” and “abnormal psychical visitations,” as well as other “peculiarities … ordinarily classed as pathological” (James 1902/1985, p. 15), and there is evidence that those who join new religious or spiritual movements are more prone to such experiences as well (S. Day & Peters

1999; Farias et al. 2005; Kinsella 2016; L. Smith et al. 2009). The DSM has, over time, acknowledged that whereas some people find NOEs distressing and seek clinical care, others do not. In fact, some traditions encourage believers to seek experiences that are phenomenologically similar to those described in the DSM: Pentecostal Christians are encouraged to speak in tongues, Tibetan Buddhists to visualize unseen beings, and Sufi Muslims to sense God through meditation and dance.

Luhrmann and colleagues (2015) used a shared feature—hearing voices—to compare the lived experiences of participants from the U.S., India, and Ghana. Participants were asked to describe their experience (e.g., how many voices they heard, how often, what the voices said) as well as how they interpreted it (e.g., who they thought the voices were, whether the experience was distressing, and whether the experience was as a whole negative or positive). Although

Americans reported that the voices were harsh and their experiences were as a whole very distressing, many Indians and Ghanaians reported that their experiences were partially or fully positive. Americans viewed their experiences as psychopathological, and many described voices that told them to hurt other people or themselves. Indians and Ghanaians, in contrast, only rarely used diagnostic criteria or referred to their voice hearing as schizophrenia. Indians described

29 their voices as close relatives, and the voices behaved as relatives do: although they were at times scolding, they also gave guidance and reminded them of their domestic tasks. Ghanaians commonly interpreted their voices as God or as disembodied spirits. Luhrmann and colleagues suggest that these differences are partially due to the individualism of North Americans compared to the more collectivistic or interdependent Indians and Ghanaians. Thus, although people in all three cultures had the experience of hearing voices, the phenomenological details of their experiences varied (e.g., what the voices said), as did the way they appraised them (e.g., who they thought the voices were) and how distressing they found them.

1.4.4 How Experiences Shape Culture

When people have NOEs, sometimes they view them as personally meaningful and transformative, and sometimes they appraise them as religious or spiritual, psychopathological, or extraordinary; sometimes NOEs change people's lives—for better or worse—and in some cases they have even changed the course of human history.

When people have NOEs that have been marked by their group—for instance as means to gain deep insight or interact with unseen beings—this can reinforce adherence to the group and its interpretive frame. Conversely, if people strive and fail to have such NOEs, they may question this interpretive frame and may decide to leave the group (for numerous examples, see Streib et al. 2009). In other instances, people have NOEs—whether positive or negative—that do not fit within their existing cultural frames. Lindahl et al. (2017, 2020), for example, found that many

Buddhist meditators have experiences, at times distressing, that do not fit with Buddhist expectations. When people have experiences for which they have no ready interpretations, they

30 may keep their experiences to themselves or actively seek advice. In some instances, trusted authorities such as religious specialists or mental health professionals can help them understand their experiences within a familiar framework; however, in other instances, such experiences can lead people to explore new interpretive frames or to modify existing ones (Buckser & Glazier

2003).

People who claim that they have had an experience that breaks with their existing interpretive frames may offer idiosyncratic interpretations, which others may find compelling, misguided, or delusional (e.g., Maher 2006). If others find the interpretations compelling, this can lead to the formation of new groups and the emergence of new social movements.

The world’s religions illustrate the impact that such experiences can have: Buddhism,

Christianity, and Islam trace their emergence to the NOEs of their founders and/or the confirmatory experiences of their first followers. Siddhartha Gautama claimed he experienced enlightenment, which led his followers to refer to him as the Buddha (literally “the enlightened one”). Paul of Tarsus claimed Jesus appeared to him in a vision on the road to Damascus, which led him to become a follower of the “risen Christ” (literally “the messiah who had risen from the dead”). Muhammad recited words he claimed came directly from God, which established him in the eyes of his followers as the last of the prophets. NOEs have also played a key role in the emergence of more historically recent religious movements, such as Mormonism, and spiritual movements, such as Alcoholics Anonymous and A Course in Miracles (Taves 2016). Moreover,

QAnon, the conspiracy theory that generated a widespread social movement with political consequences during Donald Trump’s presidency, can easily be framed as a new religious

31 movement in which the mysterious “Q” is offering prophetic predictions and mobilizing followers in anticipation of an impending apocalypse (LaFrance, 2020).

In sum, the interplay between culture and experiences means that researchers cannot assume that experiences that seem ordinary or nonordinary to them or to people within a particular culture would be viewed as such by people within other cultures. Instead, we need to distinguish between those experiences that consistently stand out for people across cultures and those that vary based on culture-specific interpretive frameworks. Although historians and ethnographers are well-equipped to do this on an individual and small-scale level (e.g., using case studies and ethnographic fieldwork; Atran et al. 2005; Cassaniti & Luhrmann 2014; N. Ross 2004), researchers need tools to query those experiences that stand out for people on a population level.

We next present a new survey that allows researchers to do just that.

2. The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE) as a Tool for Cross-Cultural

Comparisons

2.1. The Structure of the INOE

If we want to distinguish NOEs that are relatively stable from those that vary at the population level, we need a survey that can do three things. First, in formulating queries, it should distinguish between the generic features of an experience and the claims-laden lived experience as a whole. Second, it should query both the generic features and claims made about them (i.e., how they are appraised). Third, it should include a wide range of experiences that might stand out for people including experiences that commonly appear on instruments designed to measure

32 researcher-defined claims-laden constructs. The design of the Inventory of Nonordinary

Experience (INOE) implements these three design features.

Since the INOE queries a wide range of experiences that may stand out to people, we must treat each experience as its own construct. Taken together, the experiences queried by the INOE, therefore, do not measure a single underlying construct or latent variable (Wolf et al., In press).

The design of the INOE allows us to determine (1) the prevalences with which experiences

(specifically, the generic features of lived experiences) are reported in different populations, and

(2) the extent to which cultural interpretive frameworks can explain similarities and differences in the prevalences of such experiences.

2.1.1. A Wide Range of Experiences

Given that people can potentially mark any experience as special (Durkheim, 1912/1995, 44;

Taves, 2009, 28-47) , we included a wide range of experiences in the INOE that we as researchers have reason to think might stand out for people, without claiming that the list of such experiences is comprehensive. The experience items included in the INOE were gathered from several sources. First, we reviewed existing scales created by Western researchers to measure purportedly cross-culturally stable constructs, such as schizotypy or exceptional, anomalous, or mystical experiences (for scales reviewed, see Supplement S2);7 these scales are a good source

7 For an in-depth discussion of conceptual problems with the two most commonly used mysticism scales – the

Mysticism Scale (Hood, 1975) and the MEQ 30 (Barrett et al., 2015) -- both of which are based on Stace’s (1960)

33 for experiences that most Western researchers would deem nonordinary. Second, we looked to religious and spiritual traditions as a source for experiences that stand out to particular populations around the world. Third, we created items that query types of things—i.e., objects, places, and persons—that people might mark as special. Finally, we attempted to capture a wide range of life events—e.g., childbirth, marriage, or the death of a loved one—that may stand out for people by asking about instances of an emotional experience, such as joy or loss, that stood out from other such experiences. In sum, we do not claim that the INOE includes all possible human experiences that might stand out for one reason or another; rather, we included a range of experiences that would allow us to investigate (1) patterns of stability and variation in the experiences that stand out to people, and (2) the effects of culture on experiences.

2.1.2. Generic Features and Lived Experiences

Researchers interested in such disparate topics as religious experience (Taves 2009a, 2020b), anomalous experience (Irwin et al. 2013; Lange et al. 2019; Maraldi & Krippner 2019; R. M.

Ross et al., 2017), psychosis (Alminhana et al. 2017; Peters et al. 2017; R. Underwood et al.

2016), and placebo effects (Ashar et al. 2017) have argued that appraisal processes play a critical role in shaping our experiences, and called for new surveys that distinguish between experiences and appraisals. That is, in our words, they have called on researchers to distinguish between the generic features of experiences of interest to the researchers, and the lived experiences recounted by subjects, which are replete with embedded appraisals (that is, cultural schemas and frames).

definition of mysticism, and the new Nondual Awareness Dimensional Assessment (NADA; Hanley et al., 2018), which was based on Buddhist philosophical teachings, see (Taves, 2020b).

34

However, existing surveys still tend to conflate generic features and appraisals. We can illustrate this problem using queries about sensed presences that appear in several different surveys (see

Table 2).

EXPERIENCE QUERIES SOURCE “I feel God’s presence.” Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale (L. G. Underwood & Teresi 2002) “Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or Near Death Experiences Scale presence?” (Greyson 1983) “Did you see deceased spirits or religious figures?” NDE Scale (Greyson 1983) “I have seen a ghost or apparition. … an Anomalous Experience Inventory extraterrestrial … elves, fairies, and other types of (Gallagher et al. 1994) little people.” “Have you sometimes sensed an evil presence around The Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of you, even though you could not see it?” Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE; Mason & Claridge 2006) “I have felt the presence of a force, energy, entity, or PAGE-R (Fach et al. 2013) atmosphere that is invisible to the ordinary senses.”

Table 2. Queries about experiences of sensed presences that appear in several different surveys.

The appraisals embedded in each query are bolded. PAGE-R did the most to focus on a generic feature of the lived experience.

The sensed presences item in the INOE adapted the more generic wording of the PAGE-R and further qualified it with “what seemed to be” to read: “I have sensed the presence of what seemed to be nonordinary forces or entities.”

35

2.1.3. Appraisals

The follow-up appraisal queries allow us to uncover aspects of a subject’s lived experience, including the mental state the subject was in when the experience was occurring, and how personally meaningful or transformative the experience was—for better or worse. The mental state query allows us to investigate whether the experience occurred under normal waking conditions or under a range of other conditions, such as asleep (dreaming); while falling asleep or waking up; mentally or physically exhausted; under the influence of drugs or alcohol; or while mentally or physically ill. Religious and spiritual traditions often consider dreams and psychoactive drugs as means of interacting with divine entities, acquiring transcendent knowledge, and/or entering spiritual realms, making this an important aspect of the lived experience to query.

Additional queries allow us to investigate how subjects categorize their experience and what they think caused it. Here, researchers can and should offer culture-appropriate categories. For example, scholars have long recognized that the terms “religion” and “religious” do not have precise equivalents in non-Euro-American cultures (Fitzgerald 2003; McCutcheon 2003). Thus, instead of viewing “religious” and other key terms as if they are universal concepts, researchers can use “religious” (or its cognates) in societies where it is culturally appropriate, and use other terms, such as dharma in India or dao in China, where it is not. Whatever terms are used, it is incumbent on researchers to understand how subjects understand the meaning(s) of the terms and interpret their responses in light of this culture-specific understanding.

36

2.2. The Utility of a Feature-Based Approach

Here, we illustrate the usefulness of a feature-based approach for comparing NOEs across cultures. We present data collected from the U.S. (N = 843) and India (N = 721) using an early

(and unvalidated) version of the INOE. The early version of the INOE consisted of 76 experience items, followed by a series of appraisal queries. We focus on two appraisals: First, whether the experience was appraised as religious or spiritual, indexed with "Do you consider this experience spiritual or religious?" (yes/unsure/no). Second, whether it was deemed personally transformative, indexed with "How significant has this experience been for you?" (from 0 = Not at all, to 3 = Very) and "How has this experience affected your life since it occurred?" (from -3 =

Very negatively, to 3 = Very positively). See Supplements S2 and S3 for details about the two samples, the version of the INOE used here, and analyses.

We emphasize that the analyses presented here are all highly exploratory. Our aim is not to build a strong empirical argument regarding similarities and differences in NOEs across cultures or the interaction of culture and experiences, but to illustrate the broad utility of a features-based approach. That said, we highlight three potential benefits of this approach: (1) A features-based approach allows us to gauge the effects of dominant cultures on the frequencies with which experience items are reported across populations. The historically dominant religious traditions in the U.S. and India—Protestant Christianity in the U.S. and Hinduism in India—may make the overall frequency with which these particular experiences are reported less common in the U.S. and more common in India. (2) A feature-based approach allows us to infer reasons why people are paying attention to and remembering the experience items they are reporting. Here we use the

37 appraisal data to infer that such experiences are attention-grabbing and memorable for at least three reasons: they are (a) personally transformative, (b) culturally valorized, and (c) merely unexpected or surprising. (3) The feature-based approach also allows us to identify differences in the specific experience items reported by cultural subgroups (“cultural footprints”).

2.2.1. How Dominant Cultures Shape NOEs in the U.S. and India

The historically dominant religious tradition in the U.S., Protestant Christianity, has long downplayed religious and spiritual experiences (Taves 1999; Thomas 1971). Over the past several centuries, this has affected other religious traditions as they entered the U.S. and assimilated into the broader U.S. culture (C. Taylor 2007). The constraints that mainstream

Protestants historically placed on “authentic” religious experience led to a narrowing of the range of experiences in which religious North Americans might expect supernatural powers and forces to manifest in the world. The consequent secularization of experiences allowed the medical profession to pathologize NOEs in the general population without much pushback from religious groups; this trend has advanced to the point that Allen Frances, chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, has called for “saving normal” from out-of-control psychiatric diagnosis (Frances 2013).

In contrast, psychiatry holds much less sway in India (Kakar 1982; Mills 2001), and Hinduism, the historically dominant religious tradition in India, valorizes a wide range of experiences in its religious teachings and encourages people to actively cultivate them via practices such as darshan (seeing and being seen by deities in statues or images [murtis]), puja (making offerings to deities [murtis] at home or in temples), and rituals for infusing the energy or essence of deities into statues and images to transform them into murtis (Huyler 1999).

38

We thus expected—and found—that, as a group, respondents in the U.S. were less likely to report having had NOEs compared to respondents in India. Almost all experiences were more frequent in India than in the U.S. or were reported at similar frequencies in the two countries. See

Figure 2A for a comparison of the frequencies of NOEs reported in the U.S. and India. Each number represents an experience item. NOEs reported more frequently in the U.S. fall below the diagonal line, whereas NOEs reported more frequently in India fall above the diagonal line.

Figure 2. Comparison of the mean frequencies of reported NOEs between: (A) the U.S. and

India, (B) U.S. Christians and Indian Christians, (C) Indian Hindus and Indian Christians, (D)

US. “nones” (people who identified as atheists or agnostics or as neither religious nor spiritual) and U.S. Christians, and (E) U.S. SBNR (people who identified as spiritual but not religious) and

39 U.S. Christians. The dashed diagonal line represents where experiences that are reported at similar frequencies in the two populations compared should fall. Each number represents an experience item. See Supplement S2 for a key.

We can further investigate the role of dominant cultures in shaping experiences by comparing

Indian Christians (N = 86) to U.S. Christians (N = 405) (same religion but different dominant culture) on the one hand, and to Indian Hindus (N = 525) (same dominant culture but different religion) on the other. When we do this, we find that almost all experiences were more frequent among Indian Christians as compared to U.S. Christians or were reported at similar frequencies in the two cultural subgroups (Figure 2B); the prevalences between Indian Christians and Indian

Hindus were similar (Figure 2C). These findings suggest that dominant cultures can play a large role in shaping expectations about experiences.

Within the U.S., we find that the prevalences of experiences reported by participants who identify as neither religious nor spiritual or as atheists or agnostics (“nones”; N = 247) are very similar to those reported by U.S. Christians (see Figure 2D); this is not surprising given the general secularization of religious and spiritual experiences in the U.S. However, this secularizing trend is not uniform across all U.S. religious and spiritual traditions. Spiritual but not religious (SBNR; N = 96) participants generally reported higher prevalences of NOEs as compared to U.S. Christians (see Figure 2E). We can make sense of this in light of two compatible observations: those who join new religious and spiritual movements in the U.S. report higher levels of positive schizotypy (Day & Peters 1999; Farias et al. 2005; Willard &

Norenzayan 2017), and such movements actively cultivate a wide range of NOEs (e.g., Kinsella

40 2016). Indeed, whereas most mainstream minority religions in the U.S. have assimilated to the dominant Protestant Christian culture, new religious and spiritual movements are known for adopting a counter-cultural stance, which in the U.S. typically entails a “re-sacralization” of a relatively secularized world (Kinsella 2016; Partridge 2004, 2005).

2.2.2. Why some experiences stand out from the ordinary or everyday

In defining extraordinary (psychical, paranormal, anomalous, or exceptional) experiences, researchers have suggested that experiences stand out because they are rare or because, although common, they deviate from ordinary or everyday experience.8 If we examine similarities and differences in the top 10 NOEs reported in the U.S. and India (see Tables 3-5), we can use our appraisals to expand on this proposal. We can infer at least three reasons why people might be

8 Consider these three definitions of anomalous and exceptional experiences (with key terms emphasized):

(1) Anomalous Experiences (Cardeña et al. 2000, 4): “an uncommon experience, or one that, although

experienced by a significant number of persons, is believed to markedly deviate from ordinary experience

or from the usually accepted explanations of reality according to Western mainstream science”.

(2) Exceptional Human Experiences (Kohls & Walach 2006, 126): “experiences that touch on areas outside the

common-sense reality of our everyday world, e.g. a sense of enlightenment or certainty, a feeling of unity,

presentiment or telepathic experiences (White & Anderson 1990; White 1993). Spiritual or mystical

experiences can be regarded as a particular subcategory of EHEs.”

(3) Exceptional or Extraordinary Experiences (Fach et al. 2013, 1): “Exceptional (or extraordinary)

experiences (EE) are usually understood as deviations from what might be referred to as ordinary

experiences, i.e., experiences consistent with typical “reality models” (Metzinger 2003) that individuals

develop to cope with their socio-cultural environment. In modern societies, basic elements of such models

are established epistemological concepts (such as cause-and-effect relations) and scientific principles and

laws (such as gravitation). Experiences inconsistent with those basic elements are considered exceptional.”

41 attending to and remembering such relatively common NOEs: First, because they seem unexpected or surprising; this roughly corresponds to the definition of NOEs as deviating from the ordinary or everyday. Second, because they are personally transformative. Third, because they are culturally valorized.

(1) Unexpected Experiences. A wide variety of experiences may stand out across cultures because they are unexpected or surprising. Lucid dreaming and Déjà vu are two common examples of such experiences. Although such experiences were very common in both the U.S. and India, they were not appraised as particularly personally meaningful or as religious/spiritual in either country (with the exception of U.S. SBNR who were much likelier than other U.S. cultural subgroups to appraise déjà vu as religious/spiritual). If this replicates across cultures,

“unexpected” experiences such as lucid dreaming and déjà vu would exemplify one of the key characteristics that researchers have used to define “anomalous” experiences.

42 Table 3. The top ten most common nonordinary experiences reported in the U.S. and India. Rank U.S. (% reporting) R/S Sig Life India (% reporting) R/S Sig Life 1 Absorption (72%) 10% 0.8 0.5 Lucid dreaming (70%) 41% 1.3 0.4 2 Lucid dreaming (70%) 13% 0.8 0.3 Coincidences (69%) 53% 1.6 0.8 3 Déjà vu (64%) 17% 0.8 0.3 Déjà vu (65%) 52% 1.6 0.8 4 Coincidences (61%) 42% 1.6 1.0 Connect. (Others) (64%) 58% 1.8 1.2 5 Bodily sensations (60%) 27% 0.8 0.2 Love/Compassion (63%) 51% 1.9 1.2 6 Love/Compassion (56%) 39% 2.4 2.0 Inner Peace (63%) 73% 1.9 1.4 7 Inner Peace (49%) 61% 2.0 1.6 Messages (62%) 65% 1.8 1.1 8 Joy/Ecstasy/Bliss (49%) 39% 2.2 1.9 Inner Dialogues (61%) 47% 1.6 0.8 9 Flashbacks (49%) 22% 1.3 0.2 Joy/Ecstasy/Bliss (60%) 39% 2.0 1.1 10 Loss (49%) 19% 2.6 -1.3 Altered Time (60%) 49% 1.3 0.3 … 15 Meaning in Life (57%) 69% 1.9 1.4 … 30 Messages (35%) 58% 1.9 1.2 … 33 Meaning in Life (33%) 58% 2.3 1.8 Note. R/S: "Do you consider this experience spiritual or religious?" (0 = No; 0.5 = Unsure; 1 = Yes). Sig: "How significant has this experience been for you?" (0 = Not at all; 1 = Slightly; 2 = Moderately; 3 = Very). Life: "How has this experience affected your life since it occurred?" (-3 = Extremely negatively to 3 = Extremely positively).

(2) Personally Transformative Experiences. Our data suggests that some common experiences may stand out because they are personally transformative, regardless of whether they are unexpected or appraised as religious or spiritual. For example, the experience “of love or compassion that stood out from all other such experiences” was reported with similar prevalences in both the U.S. and India and in all subgroups within the two countries. The same held for the experience of “joy, ecstasy, or bliss that stood out from all other such experiences.”

Although these two experiences were not reliably appraised as religious or spiritual, they were deemed personally significant and reported to have positive life effects in both countries and in all their subgroups, including the U.S. “nones.” As such, at least one reason why these

43 experiences stand out may be because, when they occur, they are experienced as personally transformative.

Table 4. The top ten most common nonordinary experiences reported in each of several U.S. subpopulations. Rank US Catholics (%) R/S Sig Life US Evangelical (%) R/S Sig Life US Protestant (%) R/S Sig Life US "Nones" (%) R/S Sig Life US Spiritual (%) R/S Sig Life 1 Absorbed (64%) 12% 0.8 0.5 Absorbed (69%) 24% 1.1 0.8 Absorbed (72%) 10% 0.7 0.3 Lucid Dreaming (73%) 3% 0.5 0.2 Coincidences (82%) 54% 1.6 0.9 2 Lucid Dreaming (63%) 18% 0.9 0.3 Lucid Dreaming (64%) 19% 0.8 0.3 Déjà vu (71%) 15% 1.0 0.5 Absorbed (72%) 2% 0.7 0.3 Absorbed (79%) 18% 0.9 0.7 3 Coincidences (58%) 60% 1.9 1.2 Love/Compassion (62%) 56% 2.7 2.5 Lucid Dreaming (63%) 7% 0.9 0.5 Déjà vu (62%) 2% 0.6 0.1 Déjà vu (74%) 45% 1.3 0.4 4 Déjà vu (56%) 28% 0.9 0.6 Coincidences (61%) 63% 1.7 1.2 Bodily Sensations (62%) 31% 0.7 0.1 Coincidences (55%) 9% 1.2 0.7 Lucid Dreaming (72%) 24% 1.1 0.4 5 Love/Compassion (54%) 45% 2.4 2.0 Bodily Sensations (59%) 50% 1.1 0.5 Coincidences (59%) 54% 1.8 1.2 Bodily Sensations (51%) 5% 0.4 0.1 Love/Compassion (70%) 46% 2.3 1.8 6 Bodily Sensations (54%) 33% 0.8 0.2 Déjà vu (58%) 23% 0.7 0.3 Flashbacks (54%) 36% 1.4 0.7 Love/Compassion (49%) 10% 2.3 2.0 Bodily Sensations (70%) 46% 1.1 0.4 7 Loss (47%) 32% 2.5 -1.5 Inner Peace (53%) 92% 2.4 2.0 Love/Compassion (50%) 39% 2.3 1.9 Flashbacks (49%) 10% 1.2 -0.1 Smell (60%) 47% 1.4 0.8 8 Connect. (Others) (47%) 77% 1.9 1.5 Loss (51%) 15% 2.5 -1.0 Inner Peace (48%) 77% 2.2 1.9 Time Altered (47%) 3% 0.6 -0.1 Psychic Vampirism (59%) 29% 1.3 -0.1 9 Inner Peace (45%) 77% 2.1 1.7 Awe (50%) 67% 2.3 1.7 Joy/Ecstacy/Bliss (48%) 53% 2.4 2.1 Pleasure (45%) 5% 1.6 1.2 Loss (58%) 15% 2.6 -1.2 10 Pain (44%) 14% 1.9 -0.3 Meaning in Life (49%) 94% 2.4 2.0 Loss (44%) 20% 2.8 -1.5 Ineffability (45%) 6% 1.3 0.2 Messages (57%) 70% 2.5 2.0 11 Joy/Ecstasy/Bliss (44%) 39% 2.3 1.9 Joy/Ecstasy/Bliss (49%) 60% 2.3 2.1 Joy/Ecstasy/Bliss (44%) 17% 2.0 1.8 Joy/Ecstasy/Bliss (49%) 45% 2.4 2.1 12 Inner Peace (55%) 64% 2.2 2.0 19 Inner Peace (38%) 22% 1.5 1.2 23 Messages (34%) 82% 2.0 1.4 32 Messages (31%) 56% 1.5 1.3 35 Messages (29%) 61% 1.9 0.8 38 Messages (24%) 17% 1.2 0.4 Note. R/S: "Do you consider this experience spiritual or religious?" (0 = No; 0.5 = Unsure; 1 = Yes). Sig: "How significant has this experience been for you?" (0 = Not at all; 1 = Slightly; 2 = Moderately; 3 = Very). Life: "How has this experience affected your life since it occurred?" (-3 = Extremely negatively to 3 = Extremely positively).

Table 5. The top ten most common nonordinary experiences reported in each of several Indian subpopulations. Rank IN Shaiva (%) R/S Sig Life IN Vaishnava (%) R/S Sig Life IN Sanatana Dharma (%) * IN Hindu: Other (%) R/S Sig Life IN Christian (%) R/S Sig Life IN Muslim (%) * 1 Connect. (Others) (73%) 42% 2.0 1.3 Coincidences (71%) 52% 1.4 1.0 Lucid Dreaming (80%) Coincidences (69%) 51% 1.8 0.9 Lucid Dreaming (78%) 54% 1.2 0.6 Déjà vu (73%) 2 Lucid Dreaming (72%) 27% 1.4 0.6 Lucid Dreaming (65%) 40% 1.6 0.3 Inner Peace (78%) Lucid Dreaming (67%) 43% 1.3 0.2 Inner Peace (69%) 83% 1.8 1.3 Coincidences (71%) 3 Love/Compassion (72%) 48% 1.8 1.1 Inner Dialogues (64%) 63% 1.5 0.7 Déjà vu (76%) Déjà vu (63%) 54% 1.7 1.0 Mental Healing (64%) 73% 2.2 1.5 Lucid Dreaming (67%) 4 Coincidences (72%) 57% 1.4 0.7 Inner Peace (62%) 59% 1.8 1.2 Unity (71%) Inner Dialogues (62%) 51% 1.8 0.9 Humor (64%) 32% 1.4 0.7 Inner Peace (63%) 5 Joy/Ecstacy/Bliss (70%) 59% 2.0 1.5 Joy/Ecstacy/Bliss (62%) 68% 1.8 0.8 Messages (71%) Humor (61%) 32% 1.4 0.7 Déjà vu (64%) 50% 1.3 0.1 Connect. (Others) (63%) 6 Absorbed (70%) 50% 1.8 0.7 Déjà vu (62%) 52% 1.5 0.9 Coincidences (71%) Connect. (Others) (61%) 61% 1.6 1.0 Connect. (Others) (64%) 62% 1.5 1.3 Psychic Vampirism (62%) 7 Pleasure (69%) 56% 1.6 0.9 Connect. (Others) (62%) 70% 2.0 1.3 Love/Compassion (65%) Pleasure (60%) 50% 1.8 0.9 Messages (63%) 56% 1.8 1.1 Messages (62%) 8 Messages (68%) 72% 1.8 1.2 Messages (61%) 79% 2.1 1.4 Joy/Ecstacy/Bliss (65%) Inner Peace (60%) 76% 2.0 1.6 Love/Compassion (62%) 57% 2.2 2.0 Mental Healing (62%) 9 Time Altered (68%) 34% 1.4 0.1 Unity (60%) 62% 1.8 1.1 Connectedness (Others) (65%) Messages (60%) 65% 1.7 1.0 Joy/Ecstacy/Bliss (62%) 32% 2.0 1.2 Absorbed (62%) 10 Unity (67%) 62% 1.9 1.5 Meaning in Life (60%) 74% 2.1 1.2 Moods (61%) Love/Compassion (60%) 49% 2.0 1.1 Time Altered (62%) 31% 1.4 0.3 Pain (60%) 11 Love/Compassion (60%) 55% 1.8 0.8 Love/Compassion (60%) 16 Inner Peace (62%) 64% 1.9 1.1 Joy/Ecstacy/Bliss (55%) 42% 1.9 0.8 18 Joy/Ecstacy/Bliss (54%) 26 Déjà vu (61%) 64% 2.0 0.9 Note. R/S: "Do you consider this experience spiritual or religious?" (0 = No; 0.5 = Unsure; 1 = Yes). Sig: "How significant has this experience been for you?" (0 = Not at all; 1 = Slightly; 2 = Moderately; 3 = Very). Life: "How has this experience affected your life since it occurred?" (-3 = Extremely negatively to 3 = Extremely positively). * The sample sizes for these subcultures were not large enough to explore appraisals. See Supplements for details.

(3) Culturally Valorized Experiences. In light of differences in the frequency with which experiences were reported coupled with differences in the way they were appraised, we can identify experiences that may have stood out because they are culturally valorized (regardless of whether they are unexpected). Culturally valorized experiences not only exhibit variable prevalences between populations, but when they are reported they are more likely to be appraised as both religious/spiritual and personally transformative. We find this pattern with

Revealed Messages. Although this experience was reported much more frequently in India

(62%) than the U.S. (35%), when it was reported, it was appraised as both religious/spiritual and as personally transformative. Among subgroups in India, where frequencies of Revealed

44 Messages ranged from 60-68%, appraisals showed little within-country variability—in every

Indian subgroup this experience was likely to be appraised as religious/spiritual and as personally transformative. The importance of Revealed Messages across Indian subgroups—both its prevalences and appraisals—fits with the general tendency of Hindu traditions to promote religious or spiritual interpretations of events. Similarly, U.S. SBNRs are encouraged to look for meaning in coincidences and other happenings in the world around them. Accordingly, 57% reported having had Revealed Messages (more than any other U.S. subgroup), and SBNRs appraised this experience as religious or spiritual and as personally transformative.

Cultural subgroups that differ in their responses from the rest of their broader culture can play a critical role in highlighting the role that cultural valorization plays in making experiences stand out. Based on the frequency with which the experience of “inner peace, harmony, or wholeness that stood out from all other such experiences” was reported in the U.S. and India (49% and

63%, respectively) and the tendency to appraise this experience as personally transformative, it looked as if this experience might stand out because people found it personally transformative.

At the same time, however, Inner Peace was the experience most commonly appraised as religious/spiritual in both the U.S. and India. When we looked at the U.S. subgroups, the “nones” were outliers: fewer (38%) reported having had this experience than any other U.S. subgroup, and when they did report it, they did not find it as personally transformative nor were they as likely to appraise it as religious or spiritual. The U.S. “nones” thus suggests that the high prevalences of Inner Peace in the U.S. and India may be due—at least in part—to the cultural valorization of this experience by Christians and Hindus, and not simply because it is personally transformative.

45

2.2.3. Cultural Footprints

When we turn our attention to experiences that vary between cultural subgroups, we see patterns that can be explained in terms of the experiences that specific subgroups valorize and cultivate.

We refer to these as the distinctive “cultural footprints.” We illustrate with “Meaning in Life.”

The experience in which “the meaning and purpose of my life suddenly became clear to me” appeared in the top ten most frequent experiences reported by both U.S. Protestant Evangelicals

(49%) and Indian Vaishnava Hindus (60%). Almost all Evangelicals appraised this experience as religious/spiritual and the Vaishnavas were not far behind. Both subgroups also appraised this experience as one of their most personally transformative. However, Meaning in Life was reported much less frequently by other subgroups in the U.S. (ranking 36th for Catholics, 27th for

Protestants, 46th for “nones”, and 42nd for SBNR), and somewhat less frequently by other subgroups in India (ranking 17th for Shaiva, 34th for Sanatana Dharma, 13th for Hindu: Other, 21st for Indian Christians, and 16th for Muslims). Moreover, the U.S. subgroups were also much less likely to appraise this experience as religious/spiritual or as personally transformative.

Evangelical and Vaishnava emphasis on experiences of meaning in life is likely linked to their practice of cultivating a close personal relationship with a deity and its incarnations: God and

Jesus in the Evangelical case, and Vishnu and his incarnations, Krishna and Rama, in the

Vaishnava case. In both subgroups, the cultivation of this relationship is thought to constitute the meaning and purpose of the devotee’s life. The differences between evangelicals and other subgroups in the U.S. is undoubtedly heightened relative to the Vaishnavas and other subgroups in India by the evangelical emphasis on “the purpose driven life” over the past twenty years

46 based on books and bible studies widely promoted in evangelical circles by mega-church pastor

Rick Warren. Warren’s best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life (Warren, 2002), encourages evangelical “Christians to put God and his purposes at the center of [their] life.” In sum, the

Meaning in Life item illustrates the way in which the valorization of experiences by particular cultural subgroups can make those experiences stand out to members of that subgroup and thus produce distinctive “cultural footprints.”

2.3. INOE Future Directions

As indicated at the outset, the empirical findings presented here are merely suggestive at this point. Two key premises built into the design of the INOE need to be confirmed before we can be more confident in our conclusions. First, we need to establish that respondents understand our experience items in the way we, the researchers, intend. We need to demonstrate that subjects can recognize the generic feature in their lived experience, and ensure that the feature is understood similarly across cultures and contexts. We have developed a novel psychometric technique for item-level validation to test this (Wolf et al., In press). Considering the results obtained so far, it looks like this assumption is justified for many of the experiences queried by the INOE (Taves et al., In preparation). Second, we need to ensure that when participants say they have had an experience, they are responding in light of a specific experience that they can remember, rather than a vague sense that they have had the experience. Our validation method allows us to test this as well and results thus far are similarly promising.

47 Although we developed the INOE to investigate experiences at the population level and the interaction between culture (i.e., collectively held beliefs and practices) and experiences, it has many possible additional uses. It can be used to catalogue the experiential effects of psychoactive drugs across cultures; it can be used to measure the effects of actively cultivating experiences via practices; it can be used in pre- and post-test designs to see if interventions, such as participation in religious or spiritual workshops or retreats, change the frequencies or appraisals of experiences; it can be used with targeted populations to compare intensive and nominal practitioners; it can be used to map the contexts or the mental states in which experiences tend to occur; finally, because each item is its own construct, the INOE need not be administered as a whole—researchers can administer more targeted sets of items depending on their research questions.

3. Conclusions

At the turn of the last century, a features-based approach allowed psychologists to compare spiritualist mediums such as Leonora Piper (E. Sidgwick, 1915) and distressed individuals such as Christine Beauchamp (Prince 1905/1978) based on a similar phenomenological feature of their experiences: their sense that another self was present in their bodies. Yet despite the early promise of this comparative approach, researchers focused primarily on the evidential value of experiences rather than on the interactions between culture and experiences. As psychic research was sidelined, the comparative approach was largely abandoned in favor of a narrow disciplinary approach that tended to reify experiences rather than investigate the extent of their cross-cultural stability. Although some culturally-oriented psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars have continued to make cross-cultural comparisons, they typically do

48 so based on individual case studies and ethnographic fieldwork. Although this allows these researchers to generate hypotheses that point to the importance of culture in shaping experiences, they cannot test their hypotheses at the population level.

Case studies and ethnographic fieldwork, however, make it clear that people’s beliefs and practices interact with their experiences in profound ways. Beliefs and practices shape expectations, and as such have the potential to make particular experiences seem more or less ordinary. Thus, people mark experiences and the situations in which they are thought to occur as worthy of special attention; they can discount the markings that other cultures attach to experiences; they can encourage people to actively cultivate certain valued experiences through myriad practices; finally, dominant groups within a population can tacitly create an overall environment where NOEs as a whole are downplayed or enhanced.

Here, we called for a new feature-based approach to the cross-cultural comparison of experiences that may stand out to people. As we have argued, this involves several moves. First, researchers must separate the phenomenological features of lived experiences and the claims made about them, and, second, they must query both in order to investigate the way they interact. Third, in order to identify experiences that stand out for people relative to their ordinary or everyday experience, we need to broaden the range of experiences queried to include some that are relatively common but may still stand out for people in some cultures and contexts. Finally, using appraisal queries we can get insight into why people remembered their experiences and to make inferences as to why (and to what extent) particular experiences stand out for people.

49 The séances that were popular in Boston in the early 1900s were part of a larger transatlantic spiritualist movement spanning Europe, the UK, and much of North America. In exploring the psychodynamics of Mrs. Piper’s “trance performances,” as she called them, Eleanor Sidgwick indicated that this spiritualist movement shaped Mrs. Piper’s understanding of her lived experience. Theodore Flournoy made a similar argument with respect to the Swiss medium

Hélène Smith. As such, Sidgwick and Flournoy both understood the profound ways in which culture shapes lived experiences. Here, we suggested that it is time for researchers to scale up such comparisons of experiences to the population level in order to map similarities and differences in nonordinary experiences across cultures. The conceptual guidelines and methodological tool—the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE)—we have presented here allow researchers to begin doing just that.

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