Publication details
Feelings of presence under "god helmet": how uncertainty and culture shape religious experience?
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | How do cultural learning and uncertainty influence our experience, and to what extent are we prone to follow authoritative claims about what we should feel? In recent decades, neurologists experimented with the “God helmet”, i.e., a device supposedly inducing religious experiences through a weak electromagnetic field. However, later replications showed that the helmet works even as a sham model. Thus, in the experimental study, we plan to use the authoritative context of “neuroenchantment” to raise our participants’ expectations about having a religious experience in the lab. Within the predictive processing framework, we will prime participants to feel the presence of a spiritual entity under a supposedly working God helmet. Using a within-subject design and participant sample with varying degrees of religious training, we will manipulate their uncertainty via sensory deprivation and observe these factors’ influence on their ability to achieve the suggested feeling of presence. In the talk, I will present our preregistered experimental design and discuss possible implications of future results towards the understanding of how institutional authority, previous cultural learning, and uncertainty are influencing the nature of subjectively felt experiences and how such influences may contribute to changes in individual attitudes in the context of broader society. |