Strength of religious faith is associated with altered sense of agency during multisensory conflict

Religious belief systems shape human experience of the self and the world, yet their influence on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying bodily self-awareness remains poorly understood. The present study investigated whether subjective strength of religious faith modulates components of bodily self-awareness during multisensory conflict. Sixty-two healthy female participants completed the Mirror Box Illusion paradigm, assessing explicit experiences of ownership and agency as well as implicit proprioceptive drift, and self-report measures of religious faith and interoceptive sensibility. While synchronous stimulation reliably enhanced embodiment across participants, subjective strength of religious faith selectively modulated the sense of agency. Specifically, individuals with stronger religious faith showed an illusion of agency even under asynchronous visuomotor stimulation, indicating reduced sensitivity to sensorimotor incongruence. Religious faith level was also negatively associated with interoceptive sensibility; however, interoception did not mediate the relationship between faith and agency. These findings suggest that stronger religious faith is associated with a perceptual weighting strategy that prioritizes external visual cues over motor signals. Overall, our results provide evidence that the level of religious faith may modulate the sensory processing underlying agency.