In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion. Children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children's upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic (Study 1) or without reference to magic (Study 2). Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children's differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.

Calilasseia wrote:Anyone able to gain access to the full paper? I'd like to read this.

Wimsey wrote:The nonsense about being hard-wired to religion is one of those clever sleights-of-propaganda. Take a few observed traits of human beings, such as a tendency to hypothesize from limited information, or the story-telling habit, or the need to feel in control; juxtapose them onto an already-established power structure that has made use of these qualities to manipulate people, and Shaz-zam! religion is inevitable....
...and therefore must be based on fact.

Wimsey wrote:A child who had never been told about gods might invent an imaginary friend or talk to his toy tiger, but he knows these are products of his own imagination - indeed, that's mostly the point. Healthy children outgrow the need for such stories as they grow more confident of their ability to deal with the world.

Wimsey wrote:If you drive them crazy by denying their experience and threatening dire punishment for being their natural selves, they'll always need psychological props. And, since all fiction is equally impalpable, the only way they'll know which props are safe is by trusting a self-proclaimed expert in mumbo-jumbo.

Young children who are exposed to religion have a hard time differentiating between fact and fiction, according to a new study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science.

Researchers presented 5- and 6-year-old children from both public and parochial schools with three different types of stories -- religious, fantastical and realistic –- in an effort to gauge how well they could identify narratives with impossible elements as fictional.

The study found that, of the 66 participants, children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school were significantly less able than secular children to identify supernatural elements, such as talking animals, as fictional.

By relating seemingly impossible religious events achieved through divine intervention (e.g., Jesus transforming water into wine) to fictional narratives, religious children would more heavily rely on religion to justify their false categorizations.

“In both studies, [children exposed to religion] were less likely to judge the characters in the fantastical stories as pretend, and in line with this equivocation, they made more appeals to reality and fewer appeals to impossibility than did secular children,” the study concluded.

Refuting previous hypotheses claiming that children are “born believers,” the authors suggest 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.”

Scar wrote:Uhm I think we had a topic about this.

Wimsey wrote:It's not only religious education that causes this kind of confusion, though. It would be equally true of any teaching that requires the child to believe whatever is contrary to his experience. When we make him recite "One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" and he lives in Miami or Watts; when we tell her she can be anything she wants if only she works hard, then deny her birth control or protection from predators; all propaganda will have one of three effects: blur the line between fact and fiction, cause anxiety with all its manifestations, or turn the person off intellectually. Sometimes all three.