Do people hold different kinds of beliefs about gods and spiritsthan they do about the everyday world? Many say no: that tothe faithful, gods and spirits are real in the same way that tablesand chairs are real. Yet experimental studies have found thatspeakers of American English tacitly distinguish between twocognitive attitudes—one for factual beliefs and one forreligious credences—through their differential use of the words“think” and “believe” (Heiphetz, Landers, and Van Leeuwen,2018). In three large-scale studies—conducted in fivestrikingly different linguistic and cultural-religious contexts(from west to east: the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, andVanuatu)—we demonstrate that such linguistic differentiationof factual belief and religious credence is cross-culturallyrobust. This lends support to the hypothesis that human theoryof mind includes nuanced distinctions among differentvarieties of “belief.”

In this paper, we catalog the rates at which people report spiritual presence events: phenomenal experiences understood by the perceiver to imply the presence of a spiritual being. We draw on four large datasets (total N=3150) collected in the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, including participants from a range of religious backgrounds. This yields what is, to our knowledge, an unprecedented “epidemiology” of spiritual presence events across diverse cultural settings. While some events vary dramatically in their rates of endorsement across cultural settings, other events are relatively common across all five settings, and still others are relatively rare across settings. In general, the most common events center on ordinary experiences of one's own inner life, while events that hinge on near-tangible perceptions of presence and hallucination-like events involving outer sensory experiences are relatively rare. In sum, local culture shapes but does not fully determine the architecture of spiritual experience.