Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo

Mystical Experience in the Lab

We review previous attempts to study mystical experience and point to problems inherent to certain methodologies. Focusing on studies that use controlled environments we advocate taking an experimental approach to mysticism. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we report findings from a new study that probes the potential for eliciting mystical experiences in the laboratory. We find that our experimental paradigm is indeed enough to elicit mystical experiences. Based on subjective ratings of experience, rich descriptions from interviews, and data obtained three months after the study, our data indicate that the experiences reported by the participants had a high degree of authenticity and had lasting effects in terms of memory and attribution. These findings demonstrate that at least some forms of mystical experience can be studied in a controlled environment. Prospects and limitations for the experimental approach to mysticism are discussed.

The resource model and the principle of predictive coding: a framework for analyzing proximate effects of ritual

This is a response to the commentators of our original article. We agree that the resource model requires more detail to analyze and describe the various effects of ritual on individual cognition. More evidence is clearly needed to support our functional interpretation of the observed data. We also agree that depletion is only one aspect of ritual and that depletion may also have other psychological effects, which serve as additional functions that need to be identified, described, and investigated. Furthermore, rituals include non-depleting aspects that may have completely different effects on individuals and collectives, which would entail different functions for both. It would be interesting to see how the framework of predictive coding and the resource model could be used to analyze other mechanisms and their effects. In sum, we hope that we have convinced our readers that using a resource model and the principle of predictive coding is an interesting approach for identifying and analyzing the proximate effects of ritual.

Attentional resource allocation and cultural modulation in a computational model of ritualized behavior

ABSTRACT How do cultural and religious rituals influence human perception and cognition, and what separates the highly patterned behaviors of communal ceremonies from perceptually similar precautionary and compulsive behaviors? These are some of the questions that recent theoretical models and empirical studies have tried to answer by focusing on ritualized behavior instead of ritual. Ritualized behavior (i.e., a set of behavioral features embedded in rituals) increases attention to detail and induces cognitive resource depletion, which together support distinct modes of action categorization. While ritualized behaviors are perceptually similar across a range of behavioral domains, symbolically mediated experience-dependent information (so-called cultural priors) modulate perception such that communal ceremonies appear coherent and culturally meaningful, while compulsive behaviors remain incoherent and, in some cases, pathological. In this study, we extend a qualitative model of human action perception and understanding to include ritualized behavior. Based on previous experimental and computational studies, the model was simulated using instrumental and ritualized representations of realistic motor patterns and the simulation data were subjected to linear and non-linear analysis. The results are used to exemplify how action perception of ritualized behavior (a) might influence allocation of attentional resources and (b) can be modulated by cultural priors. Further explorations of the model show why behavioral experiments might fail to capture modulation effects of cultural priors and that cultural priors in general reduce the chaoticity of time-dependent action processing.

Does Goal-Demotion Enhance Cooperation?

Social scientists have long assumed that religion – and more specifically religious rituals – promotes cooperation. It has also been claimed that ritual plays an essential role in enhancing prosociality and cooperation. In this study, using a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate if a conspicuous and recurrent feature of collective ritualized behaviour, goal-demotion, promotes lasting cooperation. We report that goal-directed collective behaviour is more efficient than goal-demoted behaviour for motivating participants to engage in ulterior cooperation. Plausible interpretations of the data and of the mechanisms involved are discussed.

Modeling the Contested Relationship between Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi: Preliminary Evidence from a Machine-Learning Approach

This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes “distant reading” methods in the humanities and the authors’ corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors’ data; discusses complementary relationships between machine learning and human expertise; explains topics represented in Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi that set each of those texts apart from the other two; and explains topics that intersect all three texts. The authors’ results confirm many scholarly opinions derived from close-reading methods, suggest a reappraisal of Xunzi ’s shared semantic content with Analects, and yield several actionable research questions for traditional scholarship. The aim of this article is to initiate a new conversation about implications of machine learning for the study of Asian texts.

Are We Exposed to the Same “News” in the News Feed?: An Empirical Analysis of Filter Bubbles as Information Similarity for Danish Facebook Users

In the backdrop of interests in social media news and polarization the aim of this study is to examine to what extent we are exposed to the same “news” in the News Feed? The article defines news not from a classical position but from the content that is judged relevant to the user and made visible by the algorithm. The study examines filter bubbles as information similarity and more specifically nonoverlapping content segments in a unique snapshot dataset of 14 days of personal Facebook News Feeds for 1,000 Danes mirroring the Danish Facebook population. Deploying methods to analyze both link sources and content semantics the study finds that less than 10% in the link source analysis and 27.8% in the semantic analysis are in a filter bubble. The article tests and discusses suitable conceptual and empirical thresholds for information similarity that can inspire future studies. The best significant predictors for being in a filter bubble are what we term sociality: number of page likes, group memberships and friends. The study does not find age, gender, education or area of residence isolated to be significant predictors of participants in filter bubbles.

Segmentation and cultural modulation in perception of internal events are not trivial matters

The application of perceptual and cognitive theories to religious phenomena has resulted in many interesting and productive models. Taves and Asprem propose to apply event segmentation theory (EST) to model religious experience. We agree with them that religious experience can and should be examined empirically despite several methodological challenges. In this commentary, however, we ask whether or not this can be done by applying EST. EST’s proper domain is external events, which makes it ideally suited for modeling religious phenomena such as ritual action (Nielbo & Sørensen, 2013, in press). Taves and Asprem’s extrapolation of the theory to internal events such as dreams, fantasies, inner voices, and visions is fraught with problems because the relationship between event segmentation and prior knowledge including cultural ideas is poorly understood in external events, and even less so, if at all, in internal events. The modulatory effects of cultural ideas on external event segmentation have proven to be quite subtle and exceedingly difficult to track experimentally (Nielbo & Sørensen, 2011; Nielbo, Schjoedt, & Sørensen, 2013). Before EST can be successfully applied to internal events, let alone religious experience, EST needs a better empirical handle on cultural modulation of external event segmentation. EST is essentially an object perception and recognition theory that targets dynamic objects (as opposed to static objects) (Zacks et al., 2007). Events are dynamic objects, that is, objects that are perceived to be bounded in time instead of space. Just as static objects have spatial contours, dynamic objects have temporal contours (so-called event boundaries) that correspond to external physical features, typically points of maximal change in a movement trajectory (e.g., Hard, Recchia, & Tversky, 2011). Event boundaries are information dense in that they identify the structural skeleton of an event and therefore provide the primary resource for classifying and predicting events in our external environment. Importantly, EST finds its empirical support in a small set of quantitative measures of event boundaries. Using EST, Taves and Asprem propose to model subjective experience as discrete mental states or internal events. However, it is not a trivial matter to map an object perception theory onto internally experienced states that lack external objective features. When, for instance, we model how subjects perceive actions, we can compare their subjective segmentation rate and hierarchical alignment with the objective features of the stimuli and manipulate accessibility to event-relevant knowledge. This makes it possible to assert that (subjective) event perception is primarily driven by (objective) points of change in the event’s external correlate. Although EST has an experiential component in its definition of a basic event, “conceived of by an observer” (Zack & Tversky, 2001, p. 3), this does not make EST more suited for modeling subjective experience than any other perceptual theory that relies on a perceiver. EST is optimized for human perception and understanding of external events, primarily actions, that have manipulable physical properties. EST and its methodological counterpart, the event segmentation paradigm, do not provide any guidance for applying their models and measures to internal events.

Old problems die hard

Taves and Asprem’s methodological agenda is a creative contribution to the study of religion. They claim that insights from event segmentation theory (EST) and predictive coding (PC) enable scholars to reconstruct original experience from public narratives by means of reverse engineering and thereby overcome a range of problems inherent to studying textual accounts of religious experience. The authors go on to suggest that EST and PC can expand and improve on existing lines of experimental research on religious experience. While we remain skeptical about the first claim, we are optimistic about the second. The academic study of religious experience has traditionally been divided between essentialists and constructivists, the former claiming that religious experiences share a common core phenomenology, the latter seeing religious experiences as determined by cultural expectations. The reason this question remains open is because it is incredibly difficult to determine if written accounts reflect actual sensory experiences, post hoc interpretations influenced by cultural schemas, or even fabricated pieces of religious literature designed for proselytizing or discourse (Taves, 2009). To solve this problem, Taves and Asprem argue that EST and PC can be used to assess which details of a narrative are likely to refer to an original experience. It only requires that “[... ] scholars are willing to take a more pragmatic and probabilistic approach [... ],” and that the narrative in question is based on a real experience and not simply a result of biased authorial intent, discourse, or genre (Keller, 1978). Exactly when such conditions are met is not clear, but it is fair to assume that the number of textual accounts that can be meaningfully studied, then, is vastly diminished. If these conditions are met, however, Taves and Asprem provide historians with a handy toolbox. For instance, EST can be used to infer that details at event boundaries in narratives are more likely to be accurate than details between event boundaries, and that “[... ] sudden, abrupt events will be particularly well remembered and faithfully narrated.” Taves and Asprem’s suggestion that EST is useful for analyzing purely internal events like dreams and fantasies is questionable (see the commentary by Nielbo, Andersen, and Schjoedt). But even in cases where narratives describe experiences of external events, Taves and Asprem run into serious problems. Obviously, people use event boundaries when they narrate events, but the idea that narrative event boundaries represent direct and honest echoes of what was once perceived and remembered by the individual is problematic; event boundaries in narratives are not necessarily fixed to original experiences. A subject may narrate an event in any number of ways using widely different event boundaries, depending on the aspect of interest, motivation, and communicative considerations at the time of narration. Narrative event boundaries are not magical keys that grant us privileged and direct access to honest and accurate information about event perception. Taves and Asprem’s attempt to solve the old problem of disentangling original experience from appraisals in narratives is not convincing. We do appreciate Taves and Asprem’s suggestion that EST and PC provide a useful framework for studying religious experience using experimental methods (Andersen, Schjoedt, Nielbo, &

Structural Differences Among Individuals, Genders and Generations as the Key for Ritual Transmission, Stereotypy, and Flexibility

We analysed a Zulu wedding ritual, posing two questions: (i) what makes a ritual stereotyped and rigid along with preserving certain flexibility; and (ii) does a ritual pass between generations and individuals en bloc, or as a smaller subset of acts? We found that the ritual repertoire constituted only one act that was common to all individuals that performed the ritual. Repetitive performance of this act conveyed the impression of a stereotyped ritual. This structure eases the transmission of the ritual, since it is only necessary to learn the performance of one act that can then be embedded in a sequence of ‘free-style’ acts. Gender difference was minimal, but young women performed more acts than adults, perhaps as a reflection of them being inexperienced actors. Altogether, the present study unveils underlying mechanisms that seem to characterize the evolution of rituals and thereby highlighting a foundation of human cultural behaviour in general.