ABSTRACT
The cognitive emphasis in the social sciences might contribute a new approach to the psychology of religion. In sociology and anthropology, there is concern with the cognitive function of religious symbols, institutions, and practices—with the ways in which these allow people to make sense of their experience. Self-perception theory is concerned with the ways people monitor themselves and form self-concepts. It extends Schachter’s notion of interpretation to include behavior. Attribution theory is attractive to the student of religion because, unlike other theoretical approaches in psychology, it deals directly with a person’s interpretation of experience. Moreover, some of the phenomena already studied in the laboratory bear striking resemblance to those described by religious writers. The issues raised by such experimentation are fundamental to an understanding of religious experience. Phenomenologists of religion have attempted to describe the basic characteristics of the experience of the holy or the sacred, bracketing insofar as is possible any interpretative structure of their own.
