Paper short abstract:

Is virtual reality a useful technological tool when dealing with research of basic phenomena underlying religion? Our paper will put its functionality to a test, examining the problem of agency detection, theoretically related to religious experiences and supernatural beliefs.

Paper long abstract:

While previous research linked supernatural beliefs and experiences to agency detection, there are two major views on what kind of neurocognitive mechanism underlies our ability to see beings around us even if they are not empirically present. In the first view, we are equipped with a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), triggered by ambiguous data and feeling of threat, automatically causing such illusory perceptions. The second approach, based on the predictive processing (PP) framework, does not assume any innate bias, explaining agency detection in terms of interplay between prior expectations and unreliable incoming data. Despite many merits of the second view, the available empirical data leaves it unclear if there are indeed no innate agency detection biases. Therefore, we designed a novel study that revisits this problem using a new and promising technological tool in the experimental research of religion: virtual reality. Participants primed to expect the presence of agents explored a sensorially unreliable, agentless virtual forest and pressed a button whenever they felt they had detected an agent. The feeling of threat was manipulated by introducing the agents as hostile (vs. neutral). Our preliminary data will shed light on a problematic question if an innate, threat-related agency detection bias – possibly a "hyperprior" – is still worthy of discussion and if using virtual reality can be considered as a useful technological tool in the study of religions.