Schille-Hudson Eleanor, Weisman Kara, Luhrmann Tanya M
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside.
Cogn Sci. 2024 Dec;48(12):e70029. doi: 10.1111/cogs.70029.
Prayer, a repeated practice of paying attention to one's inner mental world, is a core behavior across many faiths and traditions, understudied by cognitive scientists. Previous research suggests that humans pray because prayer changes the way they feel or how they think. This paper makes a novel argument: that prayer changes what they feel that they perceive. Those who pray, we find, are more likely to report sensory and perceptual experiences which they take to be evidence of a god or spirit. Across three studies encompassing data from thousands of participants across five different cultures, we find that the amount of time spent daily in prayer is associated with the frequency of such events-and that prayer is associated with some of these experiences more strongly than others. Time in prayer has the strongest relationship with the frequency of everyday events (like dreams or strong emotion) that are experienced as not generated by the self but by a god or spirit. Prayer is also associated with more anomalous experiences like voices and a sense of presence, but prayer has no association with more dramatic events such as possession, out-of-body experiences, and sleep paralysis. Our results not only suggest interesting relationships between practice and experience in a religious domain, but hint at the power of practice to shape experience more broadly.
祈祷，即一种反复关注自身内心精神世界的行为，是许多宗教信仰和传统中的核心行为，但认知科学家对其研究不足。先前的研究表明，人类祈祷是因为祈祷会改变他们的感受方式或思维方式。本文提出了一个新颖的观点：祈祷会改变他们对自身感知的感受。我们发现，祈祷者更有可能报告他们认为是上帝或神灵存在证据的感官和感知体验。在涵盖来自五种不同文化的数千名参与者数据的三项研究中，我们发现每天用于祈祷的时间与这类事件的发生频率相关，而且祈祷与其中一些体验的关联比与其他体验的关联更强。祈祷时间与那些被体验为并非由自身而是由上帝或神灵产生的日常事件（如梦或强烈情感）的频率关系最为密切。祈祷还与更多异常体验相关，如听到声音和有存在感，但祈祷与诸如附身、体外体验和睡眠瘫痪等更戏剧性的事件无关。我们的研究结果不仅揭示了宗教领域中实践与体验之间有趣的关系，还暗示了实践在更广泛意义上塑造体验的力量。
