Articles and Chapters by Ann Taves
The building block approach (BBA) is a metatheoretical framework for studying the complex relatio... more The building block approach (BBA) is a metatheoretical framework for studying the complex relationship between human psychology and cognition on the one hand, and socio-cultural formations and practices on the other. As such the BBA belongs to the wider project of consilience between the sciences and the humanities. The aim is to provide a common language that allows scholars in the humanities and social sciences to bring psychological and neuroscientific research to bear on the study of culturally embedded experiences, practices, and group formations, including those related to religion\s.
PLOS ONE, 2023
Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitut... more Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and the likelihood that a given experience will be reported. Experiences that involve claims regarding deities, extraordinary abilities, and/or psychopathology offer an important site for investigating the interplay of mind and culture at the population level. However, the difficulties inherent in comparing culture-laden experiences, exacerbated by the siloing of research on experiences based on discipline-specific theoretical constructs, have limited our ability to do so. We introduce the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE), which allows researchers to compare experiences by separating the phenomenological features from how they are appraised and asking about both. It thereby offers a new means of investigating the potentially universal (etic) and culture-specific (emic) aspects of lived experiences. To ensure that the INOE survey items are understood as intended by English speakers in the US and Hindi speakers in India, and thus can serve as a basis for cross-cultural comparison, we used the Response Process Evaluation (RPE) method to collect evidence of item-level validity. Our inability to validate some items drawn from other surveys suggests that they are capturing a wider range of experiences than researchers intend. Wider use of the RPE method would increase the likelihood that survey results are due to the differences that researchers intend to measure.
Negotiation Journal , 2022
When we survey the current theoretical landscape, we find two distinct approaches to the analysis... more When we survey the current theoretical landscape, we find two distinct approaches to the analysis of worldviews. The systemic approach centers on responses to fundamental worldview questions (aka “big questions”); the cognitive-behavioral approach focuses on the processes that give rise to behaviors that express worldviews. If we think of worldviews as subjective representations of the environment, that is, subjective “worlds,” we can think of the first approach as a means of eliciting, documenting, and comparing “worlds-made” and the second as a framework for understanding the nonconscious processes of “world-making.” It is not clear, however, how the two approaches are related. If human answers to the fundamental worldview questions are simply reflective additions to underlying cognitive processes, we would anticipate that worldview conflicts could be resolved relatively easily. If the implicit answers are embedded in nonconscious processes that are presupposed by various ways of life, we would expect that the process of resolving conflicts would be much more complex. An evolutionary approach, which views world-making as an evolved capacity, not only suggests that the latter is the case, but also offers a way to integrate the two approaches. If, as an evolutionary approach would suggest, all mobile organisms must implicitly answer basic, species-appropriate versions of the big questions in order to survive, then we can integrate the two approaches by defining worldviews in terms of simplified big questions that allow for both proximate and ultimate answers. This allows us to embed the systemic framework in an agent-based cognitive-behavioral process grounded in the everyday life and behavior of humans and other animals. The article is divided into three parts. The first demonstrates how we can use simplified versions of the big questions to integrate the systemic and cognitive- behavioral approaches, ground the big questions in ways of life, and shift between systemic and agent-based perspectives. The second offers more refined analytic concepts—modes, scale, and scope—for characterizing this dynamic, multilevel approach to worldviews. The third offers several comparisons to illustrate the benefits of this more- nuanced approach in the context of conflict resolution.
American Psychologist, 2023
At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients di... more At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to such “nonordinary experiences” (NOEs) was never fully realize due to disciplinary siloing and the challenges involved in comparing culture-laden accounts. Today, psychologists tend to reify constructs, such as religious or spiritual, extraordinary (psychical, paranormal, anomalous, or exceptional), and psychopathological. In doing so, they face an unresolved challenge: experiences with phenomenologically distinct features may be appraised similarly within a culture (that is, viewed as evidence for the same culturally-specific construct) and experiences that share phenomenological features may be appraised differently across cultures. Here, we call for a renewed approach to comparing NOEs across cultures that prioritizes subjectively recognizable features instead of constructs. First, we review the history of the comparative approach in psychology and where it is today. Second, we introduce a feature- based approach, building on the event cognition literature, where “lived experiences” are broken down into their phenomenological features and the claims made about them. Third, we propose ways in which cultural learning shapes experiences, and possibly the ordinary-nonordinary distinction itself. We conclude by highlighting that by building on and shifting the focus of previous efforts, the feature-based approach provides a way to compare experiences at the population level.
Religion, 2019
This essay uses the ‘big questions’ embedded in ways of life and implicitly answered in goal dire... more This essay uses the ‘big questions’ embedded in ways of life and implicitly answered in goal directed action to address the future of the study of religion. It locates Religious Studies as a subset of Worldview Studies, defined in terms of big questions, in order to offer an evenhanded basis for comparing religious and nonreligious worldviews. Defining worldviews in terms of big questions highlights the evolved world-making capacities we share with other animals and upends the top-down approach that privileges systematized worldviews. An evolutionary perspective not only links the humanities and the sciences, but also suggests the priority of the nonreflective answers to big questions embedded in lived worldviews and ways of life. It presupposes a critical realist ontology, which embeds constructivism within a naturalistic perspective, and enables a variety of accounts of why things are the way they are that can be grounded (at least distally) in evolutionary theory.
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2020
Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there i... more Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of the mechanisms, whether biological, psychological, and/or sociocultural, through which these experiences are represented and differentiated. So-called mystical experiences, which some psychologists view as potentially sui generis, provide a test case for assessing whether we can develop an expanded framework for studying unusual experiences across disciplines and cultures. Evidence for the special nature of “mystical experience” rests on the operationalization of a metaphysically untestable construct in two widely used self-report scales: the Mysticism Scale and the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire. Consideration of the construct in light of research on alterations in sense of self induced by psychoactive drugs and meditation practices suggests that “positive experiences of undifferentiated unity” are not sui generis, but rather a type of “ego dissolution.” To better understand the nature and effects of unusual experiences, such as alterations in the sense of self, we need self-report measures that distinguish between generically worded experiences and the way they are appraised in terms of valence, significance, cause, and long-term effects in different contexts.
The Cambridge Companion to Religious Experience, ed. Meister & Moser, 2020
To get beyond the solely negative identities signaled by atheism and agnosticism, we have to conc... more To get beyond the solely negative identities signaled by atheism and agnosticism, we have to conceptualize an object of study that includes religions and non-religions. We advocate a shift from " religions " to " worldviews " and define worldviews in terms of the human ability to ask and reflect on " big questions " ([BQs], e.g., what exists? how should we live?). From a worldviews perspective, atheism, agnosticism, and theism are competing claims about one feature of reality and can be combined with various answers to the BQs to generate a wide range of worldviews. To lay a foundation for the multidisciplinary study of worldviews that includes psychology and other sciences, we ground them in humans' evolved world-making capacities. Conceptualizing worldviews in this way allows us to identify, refine, and connect concepts that are appropriate to different levels of analysis. We argue that the language of enacted and articulated worldviews (for humans) and worldmaking and ways of life (for humans and other animals) is appropriate at the level of persons or organisms and the language of sense making, schemas, and meaning frameworks is appropriate at the cognitive level (for humans and other animals). Viewing the meaning making processes that enable humans to generate worldviews from an evolutionary perspective allows us to raise news questions for psychology with particular relevance for the study of nonreligious worldviews.
Five commentaries and author response.
Forthcoming in A New Synthesis: Cognition, Evolution, and History in the Study of Religion. Petersen, A. K., Gilhus, I. S., Martin, L. H., Jensen, J. S., & Sørensen, J. (eds.) Leiden: Brill, 2018.
We discuss the conceptual advantages that would accrue if we were to conceive our discipline more... more We discuss the conceptual advantages that would accrue if we were to conceive our discipline more broadly as Worldview Studies with an emphasis on the scientific study of their emergence, development, and function. We realize that implementing such a vision would raise many practical questions at the level of departments and divisions in universities in the U.S. and Europe, so present this primarily as a vision that could shape both our research and our teaching.
Forthcoming in Religious Experience, Dan Fleming, Eva Leven, and Ulrich Riegel, eds. (Research on Religious and Spiritual Education) Waxmann Verlag.
In discussing " secular experience " alongside " religious experience, " we risk reconfirming old... more In discussing " secular experience " alongside " religious experience, " we risk reconfirming old dichotomies not suited to a pluralistic context if we don't seek to understand the substantive content of " secular experience. " While we can single out experiences (plural) that people view as disturbing, puzzling, or out of the ordinary, this leaves out the everyday experience of nonreligious people. If we want to broaden our scope to include lived nonreligious experience, we are back to the definitional issues that plague scholars of religion and presumably religious educators as well. To expand our approach, we not only have to ask what we mean by religion, but also how we can express what we mean in generic terms that will allow us to consider the analogues for those who view themselves as secular, nonreligious, and/or nonspiritual. A meaning systems framework allows us to explore experience and experiences in relation to both religious and nonreligious worldviews and ways of life. Applied to " religious education " in pluralistic contexts, it has the potential to help both religious and nonreligious students to articulate, discuss, reflect, critique, compare, and develop their worldview and at the same time, reflect on what it is like to live life as they do, and what, in their view, makes life meaningful.
Brad Stoddard, ed. In press, 2018. Method Today: Beyond Description and Hermeneutics in Religious Studies Scholarship. London: Equinox
This chapter argues that explanation is a necessary, but under-examined, aspect of theories of re... more This chapter argues that explanation is a necessary, but under-examined, aspect of theories of religion. After reviewing historical impediments to explanatory approaches to “religion” and considering explanation in the philosophy of science, the authors argue that contemporary attempts at renewing mechanistic approaches to the “special sciences” holds particular promise. Contrary to common assumptions, a new mechanistic approach is capable of integrating meanings, values, and intentional action as causal factors in nested levels of mechanisms. Doing so, however, requires us to shift our object of explanation from “religion” in the abstract to the concrete interaction of human behaviors.
Forthcoming in: Brad Stoddard, ed. In press, 2018. Method Today: Beyond Description and Hermeneutics in Religious Studies Scholarship. London: Equinox.
In this essay we address challenges raised in response to our article on "Explanation and the Stu... more In this essay we address challenges raised in response to our article on "Explanation and the Study of Religion"
We argue that EVENT is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists and cognitive psychologi... more We argue that EVENT is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists and cognitive psychologists can use to build a consilient research platform for the study of experiences that people deem religious. Grounding the study of experience in event cognition allows us to reframe several classic problems in the study of “religious experience”: (1) the function of culture-specific knowledge in the production of experiences, (2) the relationship between original experiences and later narratives, and (3) the relationship between experiences and appraisal processes. At the same time, construing experiences as events allows us to integrate disparate lines of research in CSR to create an integrated framework for studying both existing and emergent phenomena.
We are grateful to the commentators who took the time to respond to our target article and think ... more We are grateful to the commentators who took the time to respond to our target article and think they raised a number of important concerns. Before discussing them, however, we were pleased to note that there was little opposition to the general idea of viewing experiences as events. Although Radvansky (as well as Zacks) did not envision this use of their theory, we were particularly gratified that Radvansky not only affirmed but offered means of extending our application of their research into the realm of experience. Our response to the concerns raised falls under four headings: (1) opening clarifications, (2) issues related to the use of first-‐person narratives, (3) concerns related to extending event segmentation theory (EST) to internally experienced states, and (4) the effects of cross-‐event integration. I. Opening Clarifications Experience as Event: Kavanagh worries that our definition of events is too broad and suggests that event cognition is the " preferred analytical method to employ for all research on religious experience. " We adopted the definition used in the event cognition literature (Zacks & Tversky 2001). Researchers in this field intentionally define it broadly, recognizing that people view events in multiple timeframes from the micro to the macro and can readily switch between perspectives. In referring to " experiences as events, " our intention was to distinguish between experience as the flow of information and experiences, which reflect the chunking of the flow of information into events with a beginning and an end. This framework not only gave us a starting point for recasting some traditional problems in the study of " religious experience " but also, as we will discuss below, provides a means of integrating disparate lines of research. Thus, we do not view event cognition as " a tool " but as a theoretical framework that embeds the study of experience in current neurocognitive research on how people generate models of what is happening. [Religious] Experience: Both Proudfoot and van Elk & Zwaan raise concerns about our reference to " (religious) experience " (RE). In placing " religious " in parentheses in the title, we meant to signal our embrace of an attributional approach (Taves 2009) in which we assume that no experiences are inherently religious (or spiritual) and that their characterization as such is a matter of appraisal, both conscious and unconscious. Thus, we were presupposing from the outset that there is, as van Elk
We argue that EVENT is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists and cognitive psychologi... more We argue that EVENT is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists and cognitive psychologists can use to build a consilient research platform for the study of experiences that people deem religious. Grounding the study of experience in event cognition allows us to reframe several classic problems in the study of “religious experience”: (1) the function of culture-specific knowledge in the production of experiences, (2) the relationship between original experiences and later narratives, and (3) the relationship between experiences and appraisal processes. At the same time, construing experiences as events allows us to integrate disparate lines of research in CSR to create an integrated framework for studying both existing and emergent phenomena.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 50/4:376-399, 2014
In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively ve... more In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted as a legitimate object of study, whereas the former was not. Comparison of the Congresses suggests that those interested in the study of religion were willing to forego the quest for objective evidence and focus on experience, whereas those most invested in psychical research were not. The shift in focus did not overcome many of the methodological difficulties. Sub-specialization formalized distinctions between psychical, religious, and pathological phenomena; obscured similarities; and undercut the nascent comparative study of unusual experiences that had emerged at the early Congresses.
Journal of Cognition and Culture 15, 191-216, 2015
Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concept... more Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concepts of religion and spirituality in a way that allows scientists to operationalize component parts and historians of religion to consider how the component parts have been synthesized into larger socio-cultural wholes. Doing so involves two steps: (1) distinguishing between (a) the generic elements that structure definitions and (b) the specific features used to characterize the generic elements as “religious” or “sacred” and (2) disaggregating these specific features into more basic cognitive processes that scientists can operationalize and that historians can analyze in situ. Three more basic processes that interact on multiple levels are proposed: perceiving salience, assessing significance, and imagining hypothetical, counterfactual content.
Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2nd ed., ed by R F Paloutzian and C Park, 2013
Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and Cognitive Science of Religion, ed. D. Xygalatas and W. W. McCorkle, 2013
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Articles and Chapters by Ann Taves
Jacket blurb: Unseen presences. Apparitions. Hearing voices. Although some people would find such experiences to be distressing and seek clinical help, others perceive them as transformative. Occasionally, these unusual phenomena give rise to new spiritual paths or religious movements. Revelatory Events provides fresh insights into what is perhaps the bedrock of all religious belief--the claim that otherworldly powers are active in human affairs.
The book looks at Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous, and A Course in Miracles--three cases in which insiders claimed that a spiritual presence guided the emergence of a new spiritual path. In the 1820s, Joseph Smith, Jr., reportedly translated the Book of Mormon from ancient gold plates unearthed with the help of an angel. Bill Wilson cofounded AA after having an ecstatic experience while hospitalized for alcoholism in 1934. Helen Schucman scribed the words of an inner voice that she attributed to Jesus, which formed the basis of her 1976 best-selling self-study course. In each case, the sense of a guiding presence emerged through a complex, creative interaction between a founding figure with unusual mental abilities and an initial set of collaborators who were drawn into the process by diverse motives of their own.
anthropological and cognitive issues surrounding religious
experience. An interview with Ann Taves. ALIUS Bulletin, 2, 109-128.
The entire issue of the ALIUS Bulletin can be downloaded for free here: https://www.aliusresearch.org/bulletin.html