Ascription, attribution, and cognition in the study of experiences deemed religious

Abstract

There have been two major approaches to the study of ‘religious experience’ in religious studies, which I refer to as the sui generis model and the ascriptive model. The sui generis model assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that there are specifically religious (or mystical or spiritual) experiences, emotions, acts, or objects; the ascriptive model assumes that there are not. I argue that the sui generis model holds little promise in terms of linking the study of religion and brain research, while the ascriptive model, presupposed by attributional theories of religion in social psychology, provides a means of linking the cognitive and cultural approaches to the study of religion. Classical attribution theories of religion [Proudfoot, W., Shaver, P., 1975. Attribution theory and the psychology of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 14(4), 317–330; Spilka, B., Shaver, P., Kirkpatrick, L.A., 1985. A general attribution theory for the psychology of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 24(1), 1–20], however, need to be updated in light of recent work in social cognition and social neuroscience to better understand those experiences that most challenge an attributional model: those that subjects experience as inherently religious. To get at this, we need to distinguish between attributions of causality and ascriptions of qualities; although the former are invariably conscious, something like the latter may take place below the threshold of consciousness. Psychological and neuroscientific research on involuntary experiences, such as dreaming and hallucinations, has the potential to clarify the role of conscious and non-conscious processes in the deeming of things religious.