XPhiRel projects connect empirical methods with philosophical and cognitive questions about supernatural belief, agency, ritual, morality, and cultural transmission.
The bounds of religious cognition
Full title: The bounds of religious cognition: Study of cognitive and cultural factors in Czech and Polish societies.
Funding: Czech Science Foundation, project 21-31059S. Principal investigator: Konrad Talmont-Kaminski.
The project compares supernatural beliefs, cognitive skills, and demographic factors in Czech and Polish samples. It combines large online surveys with experimental sessions to study why religious, magical, superstitious, and conspiracy-like beliefs vary across relatively secular and relatively religious cultural contexts.
Ritual efficacy and group identity
This research line asks how people judge whether rituals work, and how those judgments depend on who performs the ritual, for whom, with what intention, and within which religious or social group. It includes work on religious affiliation, black and white magic, in-group and out-group ritual efficacy, and the social boundaries of supernatural causation.
Related outputs include the ritual efficacy work presented at Rituals Between Mind and Society and the article Black and White Magic: Efficacy of In-Group versus Out-Group Rituals.
Superstition, religious identity, and conspiracy beliefs
This line studies how supernatural beliefs and religious identity relate to conspiracy beliefs, especially in secularized contexts. The goal is not to treat conspiracy beliefs as a single irrational residue, but to ask which cognitive tendencies, identities, and explanatory habits make hidden-agency explanations more plausible.
Experimental philosophy, agency, and technology
Several members work on experimental philosophy beyond religion narrowly construed: autonomous vehicles, rescue robots, AI-assisted decisions, moral enhancement, agency, responsibility, personal identity, and folk dualism. These topics are methodologically and conceptually connected to religious cognition because they involve attributions of mind, agency, moral status, and responsibility.
Methods for studying supernatural belief
The 2022 Prague workshop collected methodological perspectives on scales, vignettes, implicit measures, developmental approaches, physiological measures, qualitative sociology, large-scale surveys, historical data, and cross-cultural comparison. The videos and summaries are available in the workshop archive.