Contents

Foreword

Is this extremely late? I’d think there’s still something salvageable.

We ran a yearly tulpa census very late in 2016. We wanted to focus more on tulpas this time, while collecting useful statistics on hosts as well. I hope you will find our insights useful.

I’d like to thank Meten for organisational and management help. This census couldn’t be done without you. Also, huge thanks to Alsa, and to everyone on #redditulpas IRC for their support and ideas. Lots of thanks to the beta team. You all did tremendous job to make sure the census ran this smooth.

Thanks to everyone vouching for thier support and asking for the data. We took a note from the gaming industry and switched to “when it’s done” model; and this is the most done it can be now, anyways.

Census Statistics

The census was open from December 1st, to January 1st (although we included a few results submitted later in January too). We got 330 responses, with detailed notes on 655 tulpas!

This year’s survey was longer and more detailed than the one we had in 2015, which might have caused some people to limit their participation. Nevertheless, we got lots of interesting data to crunch.

census responses per day

As you can see, the response rate was topping in the first two days, dropping severely from day three.

Tulpamancers

The opening question for the census was “How many total personalities do you have, including yourself?”

personalities count per system

The most common occurrence is still a binary system of one host and one tulpa, 48 respondents or 14% from the total number of responses have a single tulpa. One person reported having 6000 personalities.

Here’s a breakdown by age:

personalities count broken down by body age

Tulpamancy seems to be most attractive for people aged from 16 to 22. We can also see that anything above three tulpas is a very rare occurrence (for the sake of clarity, tulpamancer with 6000 personalities and ones aged 3 and 222 years were removed from the dataset).

What interests people most in tulpamancy?

what makes tulpamancy interesting

Just like in 2015, companionship and friendship is named the top choice. Overall, the bar shapes for top five choices mirror the 2015 census data (apart from curiosity previously taking the second place).

Let’s look at the trends now.

what makes tulpamancy interesting, changes

The steepest drop is curiosity. Obviously, it’s very easy to satisfy it, once a tulpa starts to communicate. Other two negative trends are fascination with the subject of tulpamancy and scepticism.

For the positive change, you can see peaking interest in tulpas as lovers. Indeed, many people in the community follow down this path, as we will see later on. What used to be a taboo topic, becomes a driving force in the relationships.

Community appeal and friends in the community follow up close. The more you stay in the community, the more familiar faces you see, which makes it a good reason to remain in the community.

Interest in the scientific background on tulpas is higher than metaphysical, and grows faster with time.

Where do they come from?

sources of knowledge about tulpas

The top four is similar to the census of 2015, with a distinction of “Other”. Friends and reddit swapped places this year.

Unfortunately, very few people elaborated on other communities. Notable mentions include habrahabr.ru (a russian tech news website that featured tulpas a few years ago), Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky (that was a really lucky result, huh), dreamview.com, facepunch.com, a few Polish forums, and lurkmore.to website.

how long did respondents know about tulpas (in full years)

Our community is still very young, with 85% respondents learning about tulpas in the last five years.

Here’s the main tulpamancy hubs where people participate actively and just lurk around:

tulpa communities

Not surprisingly (this is a /r/rulpas-sponsored survey after all!) reddit leads, with sub’s discord and .info following up. It’s 2018 and IRC is long dead.

The majority of respondents hail from the US, UK, Canada and Poland get notable over 5% mentions.

respondent countries of origin

What are people into?

Tulpamancers are a bunch of very nice people. No matter if they joined the community a few months or a few years ago most of you are willing to actively help others. Good job!

willingness to help newbies split by number of years exposed to tulpas

That said, the majority of people stick to the psychological view on the tulpas. There aren’t too many demonology mentors when it comes to the practice and people overall try to stay on the scientifially reasonable side.

views on the tulpamancy

The community is overall healthy with the majority of tulpamancers not reporting any diagnosed mental disorder. For those with a diagnosis, depression and anxiety seem to be the two most often mentioned.

mental disorders

Tulpamancers aren’t much spiritual either and don’t tend to cling to any particular set of beliefs, being atheistic or agnostic. On a personal note it’s interesting how people can be agnostic yet believe in their tulpas.

religious beliefs

Finally, tulpamancers don’t seem to doubt their tulpas much (duh!) Our hosts are good people and only have occasional doubtful thoughts that don’t overwhem them.

doubts about tulpas

Per-tulpa data

Hostey screwed those numbers up but at least I’ve salvaged the host dataset, right? I’ll work more on that now that I got the situation under my personal control.

List of Charts