Children's Acceptance of Testimony About the Spiritual and the Scientific

Via Coturnix, I learned about this post and this article about this paper by Harris and Koenig (this is not the final version) in this month's issue of Cognitive Development. I don't know about people in other sciences, but I think this is the first time I've ever seen press coverage of a literature review. It's a very interesting literature review, though, so I'm glad it's getting attention. Only, I wish the whole review was getting attention, instead of one small part of it.

The review focuses on children's acceptance of testimony from adults about things that the children either haven't or cannot observe. They describe several examples of acceptance, and integration into coherent beliefs, of scientific knowledge, including knowledge of the importance of the brain for thought, personality, etc., the roundness of the earth, and the inevitability and permanence of death. They also describe similar examples for spiritual phenomena including God's ability to have knowledge that humans cannot have (e.g., God doesn't have false beliefs, and God can see objects that are occluded), beliefs about the afterlife, beliefs about the origins of humans and other animals (including a discussion of the work of Margaret Evans mentioned in this post). In the grand scheme of things, children's willingness and ability to accept testimony from adults about spiritual matters is very similar to their willingness and ability to accept testimony from adults about scientific matters.

Still, there are differences between the two, and this is the focus of the press report. I'll give you an example of the way children's beliefs about scientific and spiritual entities differ, from the article. In a study by Harris et al.¹, children between the ages of 4 and 8 were presented with five different types of entities:

• Real entities: Things that they can see (e.g., tigers)
• Scientific entities: Things that they can't see, but have been told exist, such as germs and oxygen.
• Endorsed entities: Things they can't see, but that are endorsed by parents and other adults, like God, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.
• Equivocal entities: Things they've heard about, but that aren't often endorsed by adults, like monsters or ghosts.
• Impossible entities: Red elephants and barking cats... enough said.
  

For examples of each type of entity, children were asked whether they or other people would say they exist (whether there are any in the world), and then asked to say how sure they were. Children were most likely to say that real entities exist, and were the most confident about this belief, though scientific entities followed close behind in each experiment (and the difference between the two was not statistically significant), and they were the least likely to say that impossible entities exist, and were very confident in this belief as well. Endorsed and equivocal entities fell in between, with children being less likely to say that endorsed entities existed, and to be less confident in their belief in them, than they were for real and scientific entities, but were more likely and more confident for endorsed than for equivocal entities. In other words, children had slightly more doubt about the existence of endorsed entities like God and Santa Claus than they did about scientific entities, despite the fact that both types of entities are unseen, and their knowledge of the existence of such entities is entirely dependent on adult testimony.

Since the existence of things like germs and oxygen are likely no less counterintuitive (or counter to experience) for children who don't have sophisticated scientific knowledge than are things like God and Santa Claus, it's likely that the reasons for the difference in certainty about the existence of the two kinds of entities are pretty subtle, and may have to do with how people talk about them. Harris and Koenig offer the following explanation:

[C]hildren hear people talk in a matter-of-fact fashion about the causal properties of germs or oxygen. Such remarks do not explicitly attest either to the existence of those entities or to the speaker’s faith in their existence. Thus, children rarely hear utterances such as, “There really are germs” or “I believe in oxygen.” Instead they hear claims and warnings that take the existence of the entities for granted, for example, “Throw that away – it has germs” or “He needs oxygen to breathe.” In the case of God or Santa Claus, on the other hand, children may well hear avowals such as “There really is a Santa Claus” or “I believe in God.” Such avowals may lead children to conclude that the existence of these special beings is not altogether beyond doubt. (p. 35)

They also suggest that children may occasionally hear people express doubt about God or Santa Claus, while they would rarely hear people express doubt about the existence of germs or oxygen, and thus children are less confident in the existence of spiritual entities.

So, there is a small difference between children's beliefs about scientific and spiritual entities, and the explanation for this difference may reveal a lot about children's ability to detect subtle cues when assessing testimony from adults. Still, the bulk of the article is actually about the similarity between children's acceptance of testimony on scientific and spiritual entities. It's a really interesting literature review, so if you're into cognitive development, check it out.

¹Harris, P.L., Pasquini, E.S., Duke, S., Asscher, J.J., & Pons, F. (2006). Germs and angels: The role of testimony in young children's ontology. Developmental Science, 9(1), 76–96.