While meditation research has primarily focused on mental health outcomes and immediate cognitive and affective benefits, little is known about its influence on higher-order beliefs, such as views on free will and personal agency. Despite substantial references to free will and related concepts in Buddhist philosophy, to our knowledge, there has been no empirical work investigating the...
PsyArXivDecember 28, 2019Ann Taves, Melissa Gordon Wolf, Elliott Daniel Ihm et al.
preprint
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...