Germs and angels: the role of testimony in young children's ontology

Abstract

In three experiments, children's reliance on other people's testimony as compared to their own, first-hand experience was assessed in the domain of ontology. Children ranging from 4 to 8 years were asked to judge whether five different types of entity exist: real entities (e.g. cats, trees) whose existence is evident to everyone; scientific entities (e.g. germs, oxygen) that are normally invisible but whose existence is generally presupposed in everyday discourse; endorsed beings (e.g. the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus) whose existence is typically endorsed in discourse with young children; equivocal beings (e.g. monsters, witches) whose existence is not typically endorsed in discourse with young children; and impossible entities (e.g. flying pigs, barking cats) that nobody believes in. Children make a broad dichotomy between entities and beings that they claim to exist (real entities; scientific entities; and endorsed beings) and those whose existence they deny (equivocal beings and impossible entities). They also make a more fine-grained distinction among the invisible entities that they claim to exist. Thus, they assert the existence of scientific entities such as germs with more confidence than that of endorsed beings such as Santa Claus. The findings confirm that children's ontological claims extend beyond their first-hand encounters with instances of a given category. Children readily believe in entities that they cannot see for themselves but have been told about. Their confidence in the existence of those entities appears to vary with the pattern of testimony that they receive.

Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and Nonreligious Backgrounds

“…Children growing up in a Christian community will encounter many contexts in which the actions and utterances of adults presuppose the existence of a God with extraordinary powers. Many young children in the United States and Europe not only believe in the existence of God (Harris, Pasquini, Duke, Asscher, & Pons, 2006), they also accept that God has special powers to do the following: answer prayers (Bamford & Lagattuta, 2010;Woolley & Phelps, 2001); create species ex nihilo (Evans, 2001); live forever (Gim enez-Das ı et al, 2005); gain knowledge in an extraordinary fashion (Barrett et al, 2001;Gim enez-Das ı et al, 2005;Lane et al, 2010Lane et al, , 2012; and ensure an afterlife (Harris, 2011;. To the extent that children accept that God has such superhuman powers, they are likely to regard stories describing the exercise of those powers as realistic rather than fantasticalas confirmed by the present results.…”

Breaking the Cycle of Continued Evolution Education Controversy: On the Need to Strengthen Elementary Level Teaching of Evolution

“…The way in which these groups talk about evolution is a critical element in facilitating the development of students' views on evolution. In a series of three experiments, Harris et al (2006) sought to determine which entities (e.g., the tooth fairy, witches, flying pigs, germs, oxygen) children aged four to eight years thought existed and on what basis they made the claim for existence. Since direct observation of the entities examined is not possible, the researchers explored the role of other peoples' testimony about the entities.…”

The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

“…Developmental studies of the transmission of altruistic giving show that neither preaching nor exhortation to charity is effective without opportunities to observe costly giving by models (Henrich and Henrich 2007). Studies of children's beliefs about the existence of entities like intangible germs, angels, and mermaids show that children only subscribe to those agents whom adults seem to endorse through their daily actions, and remain skeptical of unendorsed supernatural agents (Harris et al 2006). Similarly, interviews with a diverse sample of parents from highly religious Christian, Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim families reveal that parents see religion holding their children on a virtuous life course primarily because of their costly investments in "practicing (and parenting) what you preach" (Marks 2004).…”