rawstory | A study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science
determined that children who are not exposed to religious stories are
better able to tell that characters in “fantastical stories” are
fictional — whereas children raised in a religious environment even
“approach unfamiliar, fantastical stories flexibly.”
In “Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and
Nonreligious Backgrounds,” Kathleen Corriveau, Eva Chen, and Paul Harris
demonstrate that children typically have a “sensitivity to the
implausible or magical elements in a narrative,” and can determine
whether the characters in the narrative are real or fictional by
references to fantastical elements within the narrative, such as
“invisible sails” or “a sword that protects you from danger every time.”
However, children raised in households in which religious narratives
are frequently encountered do not treat those narratives with the same
skepticism. The authors believed that these children would “think of
them as akin to fairy tales,” judging “the events described in them as
implausible or magical and conclude that the protagonists in such
narratives are only pretend.”
And yet, “this prediction is likely to be wrong,” because
“with appropriate testimony from adults” in religious households,
children “will conceive of the protagonist in such narratives as a real
person — even if the narrative includes impossible events.”
The researchers took 66 children between the ages of five and six and
asked them questions about stories — some of which were drawn from
fairy tales, others from the Old Testament — in order to determine
whether the children believed the characters in them were real or
fictional.
“Children with exposure to religion — via church attendance,
parochial schooling, or both — judged [characters in religious stories]
to be real,” the authors wrote. “By contrast, children with no such
exposure judged them to be pretend,” just as they had the characters in
fairy tales. But children with exposure to religion judged many
characters in fantastical, but not explicitly religious stories, to also
be real — the equivalent of being incapable of differentiating between
Mark Twain’s character Tom Sawyer and an account of George Washington’s
life.
This conclusion contradicts previous studies in which children were said to be “born believers,” i.e.
that they possessed “a natural credulity toward extraordinary beings
with superhuman powers. Indeed, secular children responded to religious
stories in much the same way as they responded to fantastical stories —
they judged the protagonist to be pretend.”
The researchers also determined that “religious teaching, especially
exposure to miracle stories, leads children to a more generic
receptivity toward the impossible, that is, a more wide-ranging
acceptance that the impossible can happen in defiance of ordinary causal
relations.”
