Humans have a tendency to incorrectly detect another person or creature in their environment, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as hypersensitive agency detection. New research utilized virtual reality technology to examine whether agency detection was associated with belief in the supernatural.
The study suggests that people with a stronger belief in supernatural agents are not more likely to falsely perceive other beings. This type of false perception, however, might be associated with certain superstitions.
The findings appear in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior.
“I became interested in this topic through a combination of me-search and research,” said researcher Adam E. Tratner, a doctor of psychology (PhD) affiliated with Oakland University.
“Throughout my life I have met many people who believe in supernatural agents (e.g., ghosts, spirits, bigfoot, etc) and claim to have had direct encounters with them. Despite the lack of evidence for the existence of the supernatural, these beliefs and experiences are so common across human societies that I began to wonder if there were reasonable scientific explanations for them.”
“Fast forward to graduate school and I was introduced to scholarly work that attempted to address this from a psychological standpoint, so I decided to conduct some research that investigated whether cognitive and perceptual processes are related to such beliefs,” Tratner explained.
For their study, Tratner and his colleagues first had 107 college students complete a survey regarding their beliefs in paranormal and supernatural phenomena. The students were then fitted with an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and played an exploration-themed video game for approximately 30 minutes.
The students were asked to explore a virtual forest and click the right mouse button whenever they believed there was someone or something else in the virtual environment. However, no other people or creatures were actually present.
Even though the participants were alone the entire time, the researchers found that 90% of them reported perceiving the presence of another being in the environment at least once. The participants falsely reported another being in their virtual environment about 13 times on average.
“We demonstrated that it’s very easy to get people to think that they are ‘seeing things’ around them in a virtual reality environment,” Tratner told PsyPost.
“Surprisingly, we found that the tendency to falsely perceive agents in the environment was unrelated to actual beliefs in supernatural agents (e.g., ghosts, bigfoot, etc), but was related instead to beliefs in Feng Shui. This was unexpected because Feng Shui is more similar to superstition, whereas we hypothesized that individuals who are more likely to falsely perceive agents would have stronger beliefs in supernatural agents.”
“One possibility for this finding is that individuals who believe in Feng Shui may be more prone to faulty causal reasoning, which may lead them to think that the things they perceive in the virtual reality environment (e.g., sounds, movement) are being caused by an agent in the environment,” Tratner said.
Agency detection doesn’t appear to be related to individual differences in supernatural beliefs. But the general tendency to falsely perceive other beings in one’s environment still may have played a role in facilitating belief in the supernatural over the course of human history.
The researchers hope future research can address the current study’s methodological limitations and provide more information on the topic.
“I interpret the findings of this study with caution because there are different issues surrounding different aspects of the study that could have affected the results. This study used a relatively small convenience sample of undergraduate students, which means that the findings could be a fluke,” Tratner said.
“There are also issues with the study’s procedures. For instance, we explicitly told participants to be on the lookout for agents in the environment, which may have prompted them to mistakenly perceive agents more than they would have if we did not tell them anything. Also, we only assessed their agency detection in one virtual environment, which was admittedly spooky, ominous, and filled with ambiguous stimuli.”
“The study would have really benefited from recruiting a larger, more representative sample, and using multiple virtual reality environments in order to compare the differences in agency detection across different environments,” Tratner added.
The study, “Fear the unseen: supernatural belief and agency detection in virtual reality“, was authored by Adam E. Tratner, Todd K. Shackelford, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, Jennifer Vonk, and Melissa M. McDonald.
(Photo credit: Sergey Galyonkin)