God helmet experiment reconsidered: Uncertainty, cultural learning, and the feeling of presence
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | How do cultural learning, uncertainty, and authority influence our experiences? 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 sham God helmet 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 an aspiritual entity related to Polish Catholicism. Using a within-subject design and participant sample with varying degrees of religious training, we will manipulate their uncertainty via sensory deprivation and observe its influence on their ability to achieve the suggested feeling of presence. In the talk, I will present our preregistered experimental design with preliminary data 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. |
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