Poster #99 - Children’s judgments about what can really happen: Findings from Turkey

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

From an early age, children are quite conservative in judging what can really happen (Harris & Corriveau, 2020). However, as they get older, many children are introduced to religious narratives recounting events that defy causal regularities, such as sticks turning into snakes or water turning into wine (Harris & Koenig, 2006). Children increasingly judge these narratives as real (Woolley & Cox, 2007), especially children with a religious background (Corriveau et al., 2015). Nevertheless, our recent findings from the USA and Iran indicate that this deference does not imply a radical transformation in children’s causal analysis of what can and cannot happen; it just adds divine intervention to religious children’s repertoire of possible causal factors (Payir et al., 2021 & 2022; Davoodi, 2022). To extend these findings, we collected data in Turkey, where children take a two-hour mandatory religious education class starting from grade four (age 9).
We presented forty-six 5- to 6- (M = 5.50, SD = 0.51) and forty-four 10- to 11-year-old (M = 10.41, SD = 0.50) children with 4 types of stories that varied in terms of their departure from everyday causality: magical stories violating causal regularities via magic, religious stories violating causal regularities via divine intervention, unusual stories not violating causal regularities but including an improbable event, and realistic stories not violating causal regularities. Children heard a total of 12 stories (3 of each kind) in a random order and sorted them into either “real” box or “pretend” box.
As seen in Figure 1, the percentage of “real” judgments varied sharply based on the story type. Regardless of age, children were very skeptical about the reality status of magical stories; they were less likely to judge these stories as “real” compared to the religious, β = 1.18, SE = 0.32, p < 0.001, unusual, β = 1.84, SE = 0.32, p < 0.001, and realistic, β = 2.33, SE = 0.33, p < 0.001, stories. This pattern of differentiation between the magical stories and the rest of the stories was stronger among older children as compared to younger children (ps < .01). Children were less skeptical about the religious stories as compared to the magical stories, yet they were less certain about the reality status of these stories as compared to the unusual (β = 0.67, SE = 0.27, p < 0.05), and especially to the realistic stories (β = 1.16, SE = 0.28, p < 0.001). Lastly, children tended to judge the unusual stories less “real” than the realistic stories although this differentiation did not reach significance (β = 0.49, SE = 0.27, p = 0.066).
These findings solidify our earlier findings that children make a clear distinction between the stories that are consistent versus inconsistent with everyday causality. Religious exposure renders children more credulous towards the divine intervention, as indicated by the higher belief in religious as compared to the magical stories, but it does not alter their fundamental disposition to take causal regularities into account when thinking about what could happen.

Authors

• Oya Serbest, University of California - Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author

• Ayse Payir, Boston University

• Gaye Soley, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi (BOUN)

• Paul Harris, Harvard University

• Kathleen H. Corriveau, Boston University