Stay away, Santa: Children’s beliefs about the impact of COVID-19 on real and fictional beings.

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

Abstract

Santa visits our houses unseen, and when the Tooth Fairy takes our teeth, we are asleep and can’t know how she did it. Similarly, coronavirus is too small to see, and when we wear masks, we have no visible evidence that doing so alters the particles that enter the air or our lungs. How do children reason about the unseen causal forces that occupy their world? In a preregistered study, we asked children to reason about the impact of COVID-19 on real, fictional, and religious beings. By measuring children’s beliefs about the impact of COVID on unseen beings, we assessed children’s beliefs -- in the absence of evidence -- about (a) the relationship between disease-susceptibility and the need to engage in public health measures to mitigate disease; and (b) the relationship between children’s beliefs about COVID-susceptibility and an entity’s possession of human properties.

218 3- to 10-year-old children (and caregivers) participated. Participants indicated their household’s engagement with COVID-related public health measures (e.g., mask wearing, social distancing). Children indicated their certainty that each of our targets (human, rock, Santa, tooth fairy, easter bunny, ghost, and God) could (1) give COVID; (2) get COVID and should (3) wear a mask and (4) socially distance. Participants answered questions on our Anthropomorphism Scale about whether each target could breathe, eat, talk, think, jump, and move (Shtulman, 2008). We also measured children’s belief in and liking of each being. As pre-registered, we only analyzed responses to targets that the child reported believing in: we had between 144-217 ratings from believers for each target (except ghosts, which we do not consider further).

While 87% of children said that a rock could “Definitely Not” get COVID, children were open to the possibility that fictional/religious targets could get COVID. (God - 59% responded Definitely Not; Easter Bunny - 33%; Tooth Fairy - 28%; Santa - 30%).

Children endorsed practicing public health measures (distancing and mask-wearing) to a greater extent than they endorsed targets’ risk of giving and getting COVID (p < .0001; Fig. 1). Even when children thought a target couldn’t get or give COVID, they said that the target should wear a mask and socially distance. This suggests that children’s sensitivity to public health norms may be distinct from their beliefs about disease transmission, consistent with prior research demonstrating that illness is understood in terms of behavior (generic do’s and don’ts) before it is understood in terms of microbial infection (Au et al., 2008).

Finally, for our fictional and religious targets, we predicted each of our 4 COVID outcomes from age, the household’s Public Health activities, belief in and liking of the target, and Anthropomorphism score; participant and target were treated as random factors. Anthropomorphism score was a consistent and strong predictor of belief in the impact of COVID on a target. Even without direct evidence about the impact of disease on unseen beings, more human-like targets were inferred to be more impacted by COVID (all p<.01).

Authors

• Jessica Sullivan, Skidmore College
  Presenting Author

• Katharine Tillman, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andrew E Shtulman, Occidental College
  Non-Presenting Author