Content area
Abstract
Suspension of disbelief refers to a process in which a person accepts an unreal situation and reacts to it as if it were real. Research in different disciplines, such as media psychology, neuropsychology and analytical psychology, has shown that this concept has not achieved a clear unity of meaning and that its definition is ambiguous. Moreover, in the last decade, the use of this concept has not only increased, but has also spread away from artistic disciplines such as poetry, literature and cinema to technology-oriented fields such as virtual reality, educational simulations, social media and artificial intelligence applications. This study aims to comprehensively examine the concept of "suspension of disbelief" and develop a common theoretical understanding across different applications.
To this objective, a phenomenological psychology perspective was adopted to understand the subjective and experiential nature of the concept. Using a model developed by Wouter Kusters, the change in the intensity of the sense of reality was analyzed through phenomenological aspects of temporality, continuity, modality and objectivity. With this approach, 35 studies from more than 20 different disciplines involving the concept of suspension of disbelief were analyzed.
The findings identified five common themes across studies using the concept of "suspension of disbelief". These themes are suspense, emotional investment, parasocial interaction and anthropomorphism, immersion, and sense of presence. Moreover, the three-step process of belief-disbelief and suspension of disbelief suggests that the phenomenon is related to tension and epistemic gain, with emotional investment as a bridge between them.
Finally, to discuss the concept of emotion on an objective ground, the components of the process of suspension of disbelief were supported by contemporary neuropsychological approaches based on the "Theory of Constructed Emotion" and "Active Inference" framework.
As a result, this thesis has filled conceptual and phenomenological gaps in the concept of "suspension of disbelief" and provided an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialog by creating a common language that unifies its different applications in various disciplines. Moreover, considering the expanding uses of the concept, it is expected to contribute to research on the impact of the experience of a sense of reality and emotional investment on digital media literacy, human-AI interaction, and the reflections of media consumption in clinical practice.