What Counts as Religious Experience? The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences as a Tool for Analysis across Cultures

Abstract

When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden concepts, such as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual,’ are used to interpret or appraise contested aspects of human life within and across cultures. To illustrate the distinction, we contrast the traditional research design that the Religious Experience Research Centre used to survey and compare “religious experience” in the UK and China with the appraisal-based design used by the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE). Instead of operationalizing “religious experience,” the INOE distinguishes between generically-worded experiences and the way the experiences are appraised. When coupled with item level validation to ensure that queries are understood as intended, the generically-worded experiences function as common features that allow us to compare similarities and differences between culturally-embedded “lived” experiences. Separating generic experiences from appraisals allows us to (1) treat culture-bound concepts, such as ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual,’ as appraisals, and (2) view these and other concepts (e.g., dharmic, paranormal, psychotic) as advancing claims about how and why an experience occurred. In so far as we can establish the cross-cultural validity of common features, we can set up culturally-balanced (rather than Western-centric) comparisons and avoid operationalizing culture-specific concepts.

Mystical and Other Alterations in Sense of Self: An Expanded Framework for Studying Nonordinary Experiences

“…In a related review, Yaden, Haidt, Hood, Vago, and Newberg (2017) discussed “self-transcendent experiences,” which they defined as “transient mental states of decreased self-salience and/or increased feelings of connectedness” (p. 1) and located on a continuum of intensity ranging from relatively ordinary experiences of absorption to peak or mystical experiences. Our validation team (myself, Taves, Melissa Gordon Wolf, Elliott Ihm, and Maharshi Vyas) used their proposals to refine and evaluate the self-related items that the coauthors (myself, Michael Kinsella, and Michael Barlev) drew from extant measures of anomalous, religious, and pathological experiences, as well as from traditions that valorize and seek to cultivate alterations in sense of self, when constructing our Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE; in development, for an overview, see Taves and Kinsella 2019). 6…”

“…Many were extracted from existing measures, consolidated as appropriate and revised to eliminate appraisals; others were based on our own and others knowledge of specific traditions and cultures. We pilot-tested the concept with English-speaking participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the United States ( n = 843) and India ( n = 721); (Barlev, 2019; Taves, Barlev, & Kinsella, 2017). The validation team has since translated the Inventory into Hindi and is now in the process of validating it at the item level in order to (a) ensure that the items are understood as we intend and (b) assess whether items can be translated and understood in roughly the same way in both contexts (see Taves & Kinsella, 2019; Vyas, 2019; Wolf & Ihm, 2019).…”

Working with Weirdness: A Response to “Moving Past Mysticism in Psychedelic Science”

“…Of special interest is the development of the Inventory of Non-Ordinary Experiences (INOE) that helps researchers distinguish between the extraordinary experiences that people report (e.g., “I have had an experience of unity”) and the interpretation or attribution that people make about this experience (“I think this experience was caused by some supernatural power” vs “I think this experience was caused by some brain chemical alterations”; cf. ref ). Next to these standardized scales, qualitative research methods are particularly helpful to study, understand, and analyze these experiences, using a wealth of research techniques such as in-depth interviews, participant observation, and innovative methodologies such as microphenomenology, which all help explore participants’ lived experience in fine detail .…”

Selfish or Substituting Spirituality? Clarifying the Relationship between Spiritual Practice and Political Engagement

“…Many scholars acknowledge the difficulty in defining both concepts (Bender 2010;Hill et al 2000;Streib and Hood 2016;Zinnbauer et al 1997;Zinnbauer, Pargament, and Scott 1999). 1 A complete inventory of definitions is beyond the scope of this article, but here we treat both religion and spirituality as socially and historically situated boundary objects used to describe behaviors that "invoke direct or indirect (institutionalized) connection to something that is 'other than' everyday reality" (Ammerman 2020:9;Taves et al 2019). 2 In this focus on transcending ordinary experience, both religion and spirituality share a relationship with the sacred (Zinnbauer and Pargament 2005).…”