Constraints on Children's Judgments of Magical Causality

Woolley, Jacqueline D.; Browne, Cheryl; Boerger, Elizabeth A.

doi:10.1207/s15327647jcd0702_6

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…It is likely that rather than rely on any single strategy or type of information, children make use of all the interpretive tools at their disposal. This would likely include (though not be limited to): theory-of-mind reasoning (Wellman 1990), pragmatic inferences (Grice 1975; Siegal & Surian 2004), sensitivity to linguistic cues regarding certainty (Matsui et al 2006), attention to modality (face-to-face interactions vs. videos; pictures vs. objects; Troseth & DeLoache, 1998; DeLoache 1991), narrative cues to reality (Woolley & Cox 2007), discourse cues (Harris et al 2006), and naïve theories that enable children to distinguish plausible from implausible causal processes (Wellman & Gelman 1998; Schulz et al 2007; Woolley et al 2006). …”

Section: Fiction Deception and Pretense: Challenges For Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning from Others: Children's Construction of Concepts

Gelman

2009

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

344

257

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Much of children's knowledge is derived not from their direct experiences with the environment but rather from the input of others. However, until recently, the focus in studies of concept development was primarily on children's knowledge, with relatively little attention paid to the nature of the input. The last 10 years have seen an important shift in focus. This chapter reviews this approach, by examining the nature of the input, and the nature of the learner, to shed light on early conceptual learning. These findings argue against the simple notion that conceptual development is either supplied by the environment or innately specified, and instead demonstrate how the two work together. The implications for how children reconcile competing belief systems are also discussed.

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Section: Fiction Deception and Pretense: Challenges For Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning from Others: Children's Construction of Concepts

Gelman

2009

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

344

257

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“…Other experiments confirmed the assumption that preschool and elementary school children's verbal disbelief in magic is only superficial: At this age, children are happy to be reassured that magic can actually happen in real life and explicitly acknowledge that they believe in magic and magical entities (Harris, Brown, Marriot, Whittal, & Harmer, 1991;Johnson & Harris, 1994;Rosengren, Kalish, Hickling, & Gelman, 1994;Subbotsky, 2004;Woolley, 1997;Woolley, Boerger, & Markman, 2004). It is between 6 and 9 years of age that children's verbal magical beliefs, when measured by their reactions toward observable "magical" events, really diminish-a change that can be a result of a mixture of factors, such as growing social competence, intellectual development, and scientific and religious education (Piaget, 1929(Piaget, /1971Subbotsky, 2004;Woolley, 2000;Woolley, Browne, & Boerger, 2006).…”

Section: The "Fundamentality Hypothesis": Magical Beliefs Reconsideredmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Belief in Magic in the Age of Science

Subbotsky

2014

Sage Open

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ArticleIn this article, attempt is made to show that the belief in magic is a fundamental feature of the human mind (the "fundamentality hypothesis"). Even those who explicitly consider themselves to be completely rational individuals implicitly still harbor a belief in magical powers. It is also argued that magical thinking and magical beliefs are different psychological constructs. Whereas magical thinking might have important implications for learning, the belief in magic affects communication in modern societies. Finally, the areas of practice are outlined in which magical thinking and implicit or explicit magical beliefs can be engaged, such as education, political influence, commerce, military and political terror, and entertainment. The Starting Point: Theoretical Issues and Empirical Evidence of Hidden Magical Beliefs in Modern People Concepts and ProblemsIn the modern view, magical causality comprises events that violate known physical, biological, and psychological principles and conventions. Affecting or creating physical objects directly through the effort of thought, will, wishes, or words (mind-over-matter magic); affecting people's lives and health through prayer, magic spells, and rituals, or by promising reinforcement in the afterlife (communicative magic); and harming or helping people by manipulating the objects that those people were in contact with, such as their hair, clothes, or shadow (contagion magic) are just a few kinds of magical events (Frazer, 1890(Frazer, /1959Lévy-Brühl, 1923/1966Nemeroff & Rozin, 2000;Piaget, 1929Piaget, /1971Subbotsky, 2010a). The contrast between magical causality and physical causality cannot be properly understood without realization that the belief in magical causality goes back for about 30,000 years, to the Upper Paleolithic period, when people populated nature with spiritual agents that could think or wish; that is, they attributed to inanimate things a certain "theory of mind," a concept that is alien to the objects of science. The assumption that physical objects at the receptive end of a causal event have some kind of consciousness is what distinguishes magical causality from physical causality.1 By addressing their pleas to the Gods and spirits, people tried to beg favors (good weather, good health, luck in hunting) from natural objects. In return, people were prepared to obey when the Gods and spirits spoke to them, either directly or indirectly through medicine men, kings, or wizards. From this it follows that from the beginning, magical causality had two dimensions: natural (people's magical communication with nature) and social (people's magical communication with other people; Boyer, 1994;Boyer & Walker, 2000;Tambiah, 1990).Whereas ordinary fantasy involves mental processing of ordinary characters or events (e.g., a child having AbstractThe widely spread view on magical beliefs in modern industrial cultures contends that magical beliefs are a bunch of curious phenomena that persist today as an unnecessary addition to a much more important set of...

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“…Santa Claus), their judgments about what those entities can do often differ from other entities that actually are real (Sharon & Woolley, 2004). Furthermore, individual differences in fantasy orientation have been found to mediate preschoolers’ beliefs in a novel fantasy entity (Woolley, Boerger & Markman, 2004) as well as their inferences about others’ mental states (Taylor & Carlson, 1997).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, various studies of cognitive development use machines that appear to present children with impossible causal relations (e.g. DeLoache, Miller & Rosengren, 1997; Hood & Bloom, 2008; Woolley, Browne & Boeger, 2004; Subbotsky, 1994) or unfamiliar ones (e.g. Gopnik & Sobel, 2000; Shultz, 1982; Siegler, 1976).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's beliefs about the fantasy/reality status of hypothesized machines

Cook

Sobel

2010

Developmental Science

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Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were asked to make judgments about the reality status of four different types of machines: real machines that children and adults interact with on a daily basis, real machines that children and adults interact with rarely (if at all), and impossible machines that violated a real-world physical or biological causal law. Adults generally categorized all of the machines accurately. Both groups of children categorized familiar possible machines as real, but were agnostic as to the fantasy status of unfamiliar possible machines. Children generally responded that both kinds of impossible machines were make-believe, but 4-year-olds were more likely to make these accurate judgments for the physical than biological items, different from the older children and adults (whose responses were similar). These data suggest that children's judgments about the possibility of machines are not strictly limited by first-hand experience. Young children's domain-specific causal knowledge interacts with their understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction to constrain their inferences in a rational way.

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Constraints on Children's Judgments of Magical Causality

Cited by 7 publications

References 41 publications

Learning from Others: Children's Construction of Concepts

Learning from Others: Children's Construction of Concepts

The Belief in Magic in the Age of Science

Children's beliefs about the fantasy/reality status of hypothesized machines

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