Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.