The Child’s Pantheon: Children’s Hierarchical Belief Structure in Real and Non-Real Figures.

• In Event: Coughing Santa, Tooth Fairy Glitter, Presents from Elves: Children’s Beliefs and Skepticism Towards Fictional Characters

Abstract

Throughout childhood, children acquire the beliefs of their culture via social learning. A subset of these beliefs are beliefs about things that the child has not directly experienced such as germs or fantastical characters. The process of acquiring some beliefs is simple and easy, as they are consistent with individual intuitions, folk psychology, and fit within one’s general cultural framework. Thus, the transmission of some beliefs requires little effort on the part of the child-learner, or on the part of the teacher/model. However, some beliefs, while consistent with one’s culture, violate intuitions and folk psychology, and cannot be directly experienced. Thus, considerable effort is required on the part of the child-learner in evaluating such beliefs, as well as on the part of the model in transmitting them. And while it is true that in some cases the model may sincerely hold the belief they are transmitting (i.e., God is real) in other cases they are engaged in a willful act of manipulation and exploitation (i.e., Santa is real). In order to overcome a child’s skepticism towards unlikely things, a motivated teacher/model must compel them, particularly when providing direct evidence is impossible. One method of transmission involves the model demonstrating the strength of their own conviction, where less likely beliefs require a proportionally stronger demonstration. Both sincere and insincere cultural beliefs are transmitted to children, and in the case of supernatural figures, the figures which come to be most sincerely endorsed by children (and which may also be the most enduring within culture) are figures that are associated with a model’s demonstration of their own commitment to those beliefs, often in the form of cultural rituals.

To test this patterning, responses from 176 children (aged 2-11 years) and 56 adults in both Australia and the UK/ Europe were analyzed using cluster analysis, for “how real” they believed 13 different figures were. Results showed that supernatural figures associated with rituals tend to be the most strongly endorsed as real, and that religious and non-religious supernatural figures are dissociable. And while alternative explanations exist, the evidence supports long-standing theoretical claims from the psychological and anthropological literatures on the relationship between rituals and beliefs. This research also supports established claims that children are nuanced and canny evaluators of reality claims. We show that, in aggregate (i.e., between individuals within culture) that there is a sensible ‘hierarchy’ of belief in supernatural figures, which form what we refer to as ‘the child’s pantheon’.

Authors

• Rohan Kapitany, University of Queensland
  Presenting Author

• Nicole L Nelson, Brock University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emily R Burdett, University of nott
  Non-Presenting Author