Publication details
Feelings of presence under "god helmet" : how uncertainty and culture shape religious experience?
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Ongoing environmental, political, and war-related crises deepen contemporary people’s uncertainties. But how precisely can uncertainty alongside specific cultural learning influence our experience of the world? In the prepared laboratory study, we plan to use the God helmet experimental paradigm under the neurological predictive processing framework to manipulate participants’ uncertainty via sensory deprivation while controlling for the influence of their specific religious (cultural) learning. To induce religious and other special experiences in the lab, we will use the God helmet device that is supposed to elicit feelings of presence of a spiritual entity via a weak electromagnetic field. However, it was demonstrated that the helmet works also unplugged, and the electromagnetic field itself is ineffective: the efficacy of the helmet is probably caused by heightened expectations of participants combined with sensory deprivation (as a means of sensory uncertainty), allowing people to experience previously learned cultural content as subjectively – and sensorially – real. Thus, in a within-subject design (i.e., each participant will go through both experimental and control conditions) where participants will have different types of religious training (we will aim to recruit untrained and low-religious university students, middle-trained general Catholic population and highly trained Buddhists meditating on Bodhisattvas), we will observe how will differ participants’ sensed presence experience induced by unplugged God helmet in relation to their previous religious or spiritual training and our manipulation of sensory uncertainty. In the talk, I will present our preregistered experimental design and discuss the possible implications of its future results. These results can help us better understand how enculturation and uncertainty influence the nature of subjective experiences and how such influences may contribute to changes in individual attitudes in the context of broader society. The presented research is part of a project Za hranice bezpečnosti: role konfliktu v posilování odolnosti (CoRe), focusing on the role of conflict in building the resilience of societies facing current world crises. |
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