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