Children’s Views of Others’ Religious Beliefs

• In Event: 2-088 - The Development of Religious Concepts and Norms Across Cultures

Integrative Statement

Religious beliefs play an important role in children’s lives. Preschoolers and elementary-schoolers endorse the existence of many religious phenomena, including God (Guerrero et al., 2010; Shtulman, 2008), souls (Richert & Harris, 2006), and the afterlife (Bering et al., 2005). Further, children hold relatively sophisticated views of religious beliefs themselves, distinguishing them from other mental states such as factual beliefs and preferences (Heiphetz et al., 2013, 2014). The current work further probed children’s understanding of religious beliefs.

Study 1 built on prior work showing that elementary-schoolers view religious beliefs as changeable over time (Heiphetz et al., 2017) by asking what factors children may perceive to influence changes in religious beliefs. Because people often turn to religion in times of trouble (Gray & Wegner, 2009), participants may perceive that difficult experiences increase religiosity. To test this possibility, we told 94 6- to 8-year-olds about religious and atheistic characters who were punished for breaking the law (went to prison) or control characters who went on a business trip. Participants then indicated how religious characters would be during and after the incarceration/trip. The main dependent measure was the difference between these values, indicating perceived change in religiosity. Children expected punishment to make atheists more religious (one-sample t-test comparing difference scores to zero: t(46)=7.00, p<.001), and they expected stronger increases in religiosity after punishment than in the control condition (independent-samples t-test: t(89.73)=3.87, p<.001; Fig. 1). Similar results occurred for perceptions of goodness; children expected that mean people would become nicer after incarceration but not after going on a business trip. Thus, children may perceive changes to religious belief as constituting part of a broader change to moral character, an interpretation consistent with prior work showing that children associate religiosity with moral goodness (Heiphetz et al., 2014).

Study 2 followed up on these results by asking what children perceive to be the consequences of changes to religious beliefs. Because individuals often infer that religious people are good (Gervais, 2014; Heiphetz et al., 2014), they may also believe that becoming more religious makes people better. To test this prediction, we told 6- to 8-year-olds (n=50) about incarcerated people who participated in one of two activities: classes that taught them about religion and led them to become more religious, or, in a control condition, art classes. Participants then used five-point scales to indicate their agreement with three items measuring expectations for the character’s behaviors after leaving prison (e.g., the extent to which participants agreed that the character would follow the rules going forward), with higher scores indicating more optimistic expectations. Children reported more optimistic expectations for characters who took religion classes versus art classes (Mreligion=4.08, SDreligion=.93, Mart=3.81, SDart=1.06, paired-samples t(49)=2.15, p=.037).

These studies shed light on children’s reasoning about others’ religious beliefs by highlighting the conditions under which children think such beliefs will change and the consequences of such changes. Furthermore, this work highlights the role of religious cognition in children’s moral judgments, thereby clarifying the links between developing notions of religious and moral concepts.

Authors

• Larisa Heiphetz, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• James Dunlea, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author