Prayer and Perceptual (and Other) Experiences

Abstract

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.