Possession trance covaries with measures of social rigidity in the Ethnographic Atlas
Religion Brain & Behavior June 29, 2023 Péter Rácz 1 citation
Possession trance, an altered state of consciousness where a person believes an alien spirit resides in them, is often pathologized in Western medicine but has been linked by anthropologists to social marginalization in complex, rigid societies. This study analyzes cross-cultural data from the Ethnographic Atlas and two cultural phylogenies using gradient boosting, Bayesian hierarchical models, and phylogenetic comparative methods. Results support a correlation between possession trance and several proposed social factors, but no evidence for co-evolution between possession trance and those factors was found.