Religious experiences can be found across many cultures in various forms. Nevertheless, we can trace their underlying and potentially universal factors. In her thesis, Jana asks whether these factors include sensory deprivation, social seclusion, and the influence of authority. She further explores how these factors manifest in the context of experience. Her research is based on the predictive processing theory, assuming that our bodies and minds constantly predict ongoing events and that under the influence of studied factors, these predictions – including those learned from religion – can dominate over sensory perceptions.
How can religious experience be approached and studied by empirical means? The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion currently focus on studying so-called building blocks as basic and anthropologically universal factors forming experiences deemed religious (or otherwise special). Thus, in her dissertation, Jana focused on studying three selected factors: sensory deprivation, social seclusion, and the influence of authority under the theoretical framework of predictive processing. To support general hypotheses derived from the proposed framework, she conducted two original empirical investigations: an experimental study of the “feeling of presence” related to the broader agency detection problematics (with its possible role in the emergence of religious experiences) and a qualitative ethnographic study on the practice of so-called Dark therapy, spontaneously employing all three factors of my interest within the cultural context of alternative spirituality. However, this thesis not only complements the proposed theoretical framework with new empirical data but also—based on gathered findings and their broader theoretical contextualization—discusses the possibility of a theoretical turn towards a processual understanding of religious experiences. The processual turn could extend and innovate the original building block approach and offer promising new ways of theoretic-methodological conceptualisation of religious experiences’ research.
In a new study published in Human Nature, LEVYNA was part of a team lead by A.K. Willard, studying how witchcraft beliefs affect social norms and behaviors. Specifically, researchers investigated whether witchcraft is regarded to be motivated by envy and how this notion influences community interactions. The findings show that, while witchcraft accusations were common, they were mostly directed at persons suspected of acting out of envy.
In a new Registered Report published in Collabra, M. Lang and R. Chvaja experimentally tested whether secular individuals would be willing to join religious groups when threatened with cooperative insecurity. The results showed that while this effect was weak in a behavioral test, a self-reported willingness to join was much stronger than anticipated.
