The Mind and Spirit Project

The project (formerly the “Spiritual Curiosity and the Experience of God” project) sets out to understand how cultural variation in ideas about the mind shapes the way people seek and experience the supernatural through a large comparative project. A belief in supernatural agents may build upon psychological biases in human cognition, but we think that faith is culturally constituted, and that this happens through effortful attention, often to the mind and to mental events. Prayer, for example, requires the person praying to examine their thoughts, and often, to understand thoughts and other mental events in particular ways. In this project, we hypothesize that different cultural understandings of the mind—specifically, how separate the mind is from the body and whether it “leaks”out and affects the material world; how socially important inner experience is held to be and whether inner experience is thought to be what makes someone authentically themselves; and how imagination is understood—shape the way people pay attention to and interpret events they deem supernatural.

To pursue the research, we built an interdisciplinary team of mostly anthropologists and psychologists, as well as a philosopher, an historian and a few neuroscientists. Working with younger scholars and with international scholars, we took a mixed-methods, multi-phase approach, combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews, quantitative surveys, and experimental research. We conducted research in five different countries—China, Ghana, Thailand, the U.S., and Vanuatu/Oceania—and with four populations per country: urban charismatic Christian, rural charismatic Christian, and the urban and rural groups that best represent that country’s “indigenous” religion. These four populations give us both an apples-to-apples comparison and a chance to explore the impact of charismatic Christianity on the way people think about thinking and on their spiritual experience.

Project website →

  Collaborators
  Project PI: Tanya Lurhmann, Stanford University
Co-PI: Cristine Legare, Professor of Psychology and Director of Center for Applied Cognitive Science, The University of Texas at Austin