Poster #51 - Was This Made by Someone? Examining Intentional Design Beliefs in Children Through Online Games

• In Event: Poster Session 07

Abstract

There are two competing hypotheses for understanding how children develop their beliefs in supernatural beings and forces. The cultural exposure hypothesis suggests that beliefs are influenced by one’s environment, such as their household beliefs (Harris & Corriveau, 2021). The dual process hypothesis states that beliefs are developed through an interaction between innate cognitive biases and cultural socialization (Banerjee & Bloom, 2013). To delineate between these hypotheses, research examining religion-relevant cognitive biases is necessary. Previous studies have examined the cognitive bias, intentional design bias (IDB), or the belief in purposeful creation by a higher being (Järnefelt et al., 2015) with adults. This work demonstrates that even atheists endorse purposeful creation under cognitive load and supports the dual process hypothesis. However, adults have experienced lifelong exposure to cultural norms related to endorsement of intentional creation beliefs, so it is necessary to conduct similar research with children who have limited culture and religious exposure. It was unclear whether young children could complete a creation task similar to those used with adults. This study aimed to examine whether we could assess children’s intentional design beliefs through an online platform.
The current study presented an online IDB task to 28 children (4-7-years-old) who were not screened for family religiosity. Like previously used adult tasks (e.g., Järnefelt et al., 2015; Järnefelt et al., 2018) children were asked to evaluate a series of images and used clickable buttons to indicate whether they thought the thing in the image “was made by someone”. This task included three item categories: natural kinds, yes controls, and no controls. The images of natural kinds were considered the test items since endorsement of being made by someone indicated IDB. The yes control items included images of man-made artifacts and cartoons that should receive a ‘yes’ response. The no control items consisted of images of blue shapes that were instructed to receive ‘no’ responses.
Children were more likely to answer ‘yes’ for the yes control items (.83), least likely for the no control items (.09) and answered ‘yes’ almost half the time for natural kind items (.46). A mixed-effect binary logistic regression with the natural kind items as the referent indicated a significant effect of item category, such that children were more likely to answer ‘yes’ when they saw one of the yes control items artifact (OR = 3.46, p < .001) or cartoon (OR = 1.70, p < .001), and they were less likely to answer ‘yes’ when they saw a no control item (OR = 0.19, p < .001) compared to natural kinds.
These findings suggest that children are treating the item categories as distinct from one another and displaying patterns like that of previous studies with adults. This work also demonstrates that children can complete an IDB assessment like previous adult tasks. In this poster, we will discuss more preliminary findings and the potential use of this paradigm to further explore intentional design beliefs in young children to better understand how children develop their beliefs in supernatural beings and forces.

Authors

• Adine A DeLeon, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Deb Kelemen, Boston University

• Kathleen H. Corriveau, Boston University

• Jennifer Marie Clegg, Texas State University