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ABSTRACT
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 role of appraisal processes in experience. At the same time, construing experiences as events allows us to integrate disparate lines of research in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) in a unified framework for studying both existing and emergent phenomena.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (Ann Taves) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Egil Asprem). The authors wish to thank Ray Paloutzian, Michael Barlev, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier drafts, and our colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies and especially the Religion, Experience, and Mind Lab at UCSB for helpful discussions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Egil Asprem http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9944-1241
Notes
1. For an overview of methods and terminology for the building block approach, see our website at: religion.ucsb.edu/bba.
2. Some anthropologists have used the term “fractionating” to identify “cognitively and behaviorally universal patterns” that are associated with a “folk category” such as “ritual” or “religion” or what we prefer to call CCCs (Boyer & Bergstrom, Citation2008, p. 119; Whitehouse & Lanman, Citation2014, p. 675). Although we have no objection to the term “fractionating,” we are not just searching for universals. We prefer “reverse engineering” because it is a term that is widely used for the process of taking apart something complicated in order to see how it was put together and, thus, envisions the reassembly side of the BBA. Essentially, though, reverse engineering is simply a form of analytic method of the “decompositional” type that has been crucial to science and natural philosophy since the early modern period (see Beaney, Citation2015).
3. Breaking down the doctrinal and ritualistic aspects of religion into basic elements of “representation” and “action” has a history that goes back to Durkheim, who wrote in The Elementary Forms: “Religious [and other] phenomena fall into two basic categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion and consist of representations; the second are particular modes of action” (Durkheim, Citation1995, p. 34). To these two “elementary forms,” we are adding events. Durkheim’s methodology of seeking elementary forms is a precursor of the building block approach (he even used the term “building block”). We are not assuming, however, that the elements “have the same objective significance and fulfill the same function everywhere” (Durkheim, Citation1995, p. 4). Moreover, while these elements may be viewed as “primitives” at the level of behavior, they are further reduced at lower levels of analysis.
4. Radvansky and Zacks define an event schema simply as “a representation of knowledge about how a type of event typically unfolds” (Citation2014, p. 7). While they connect schemata with abstract knowledge stored in semantic memory, we take a broader view. First, since we take “knowledge” to include not only learned representations, but also the evolved core knowledge systems studied by evolutionary psychologists, we hold that event schemata are never completely cultural, but constrained by evolved learning systems. Second, since we think event schemata are crucial not only for parsing events that people observe from the outside, but, more importantly, for events in which they themselves participate, procedural memory for the performance of tasks is another crucial component of event schemata and their acquisition.
5. Following the lead of Scherer (Citation2001, p. 371) and other emotion researchers (for a recent overview, see Moors, Ellsworth, Scherer, & Frijda, Citation2013), we are using the term “appraisal” as “a general, albeit fuzzy, concept to describe the way organisms assign significance to external and internal events in order to prepare adaptive responses to deal with their consequences.” It thus includes both automatic, unconscious and deliberate, reflective processes of evaluation that take place at different levels of processing and potentially imply very different mechanisms.
6. In our view, error monitoring is in fact the most basic appraisal process, and hence the one that higher-order appraisals are built upon. See also note 11 below.
7. Note that we are talking about “phenomenal experience” (e.g., “of something”) as opposed to “accumulated experience” (as in “being experienced”) – which is, roughly, the distinction that the German language captures with its two separate terms for experience, “Erlebnis” and “Erfahrung.” Having an “Erlebnis,” then, is to have an active working model (e.g., “I am currently typing on the keyboard”), while accumulated “Erfahrung” in a certain domain (e.g., being an experienced writer) is to possess well-developed event schemata for the activity in question. See also our discussion of skill in section 4.2.
8. Sperber (Citation1996, p. 61) distinguishes between “representations internal to the information-processing device – mental representation; and … representations external to the device and which the device can process as inputs – that is, public representation.”
9. In the following paragraphs, we are assuming that the key aspect of “culture” at stake in the perennialist/constructionist discussion is the ability of culturally specific schemata to structure human experience, the extent to which it happens, and the methodological implications of this for researching public representations of experiences (mental event models). However, since we follow Tooby and Cosmides’ (Citation1992, p. 119) definition of culture as “any mental, behavioral, or material commonalities shared across individuals, from those that are shared across the entire species down to the limiting case of those shared only by a dyad, regardless of why these commonalities exist,” we are not assuming that all schemata belong to a specific culture. Some, such as learning how to walk or how to breastfeed a baby, are what Tooby and Cosmides would call metacultural schemata, built on maturationally natural dispositions that require little overt teaching, and are found with little variation across the world (cf. McCauley, Citation2011). Put differently, some schemata are acquired very easily through evolved learning systems, while others depend to a much larger degree on contingent cultural knowledge and patterned practice (Roepstorff et al., Citation2010).
10. When the experiencer produces a public representation directly from the working model – that is, narrating an event as it is happening as in the case of “automatic writing” and “channeling” or in response to the question “what do you see right now?” – the process can be formalized as:
11. See Taves, Citation2009, pp. 107–109, for examples. Scholars in the humanities usually refer to these claims about events as “interpretations”; sociologists analyze how interpretations “frame” events; and social psychologists analyze how people “attribute” meaning to events. Cognitive psychologists in turn use various methods to analyze the role of unconscious appraisal processes in arriving at these claims. Because all these levels interact when people make claims about events, we can refer to frames, attributions, and appraisals depending on our level of focus. But because the unconscious cognitive processes constrain the way that we make these interpretations, we are using appraisal processes as an umbrella term to refer to the multi-level processes of event interpretation (for our definition, see note 5 above).
12. In other words, we are not convinced that the only effect of sensory deprivation is to inhibit error monitoring. It also has a “positive” effect, of bringing attention to bottom-up input from the default mode network that is drowned out during wakeful interaction with the external world. Thus, there is a shift in the source of upstream input that the hierarchical model tries to predict.
13. Note, however, that some of these patient groups have semantic as well as episodic memory impairments. Empirical studies on these lines would have to refine the research questions beyond what we can do at present, and carefully select and screen their test groups.