God's Beliefs versus Mother's: The Development of Nonhuman Agent Concepts

Abstract

Little research exists on how children understand the actions of nonhuman agents. Researchers often assume that children overgeneralize and attribute human properties such as false beliefs to nonhuman agents. In this study, three experiments were conducted to test this assumption. The experiments used 24 children in New York (aged 2,11-6,11 years), 52 children in Michigan (aged 3,5-6,11 years), and a second group of 45 children in Michigan (3,4-8,5 years) from Christian backgrounds. In the first two experiments, children participated in false-belief tests in which they were asked about human and various nonhuman agents including animals and God. Experiment 3 consisted of a modified perspective-taking task, also including nonhuman agents. The results of the study suggest that children do not consistently use human agent concepts but instead can use different agent concepts for some nonhuman agents like God and special animals. Children are not bound to anthropomorphize, but they often do.

The role of religious context in children's differentiation between God's mind and human minds

“…As in past studies, children began to differentiate God's mind from human minds during the preschool years (e.g., Barrett et al, 2001). However, in contrast to some recent studies (Gim enez-Das ı et al, 2005;Kiessling & Perner, 2014;Lane et al, 2010Lane et al, , 2012, children rarely attributed mental state limitations to God even as their understanding of the limitations of human minds improved.…”

“…In some studies, with American Protestant (Barrett, Newman, & Richert, 2003;Barrett, Richert, & Driesenga, 2001;Richert & Barrett, 2005;Wigger, Paxson, & Ryan, 2013) and Yucatec Mayan participants (Knight, Sousa, Barrett, & Atran, 2004), children rarely attributed mental state limitations to God even as their understanding of the limitations of human minds improved. In other studies, with Spanish children in secular or religious schools (Gim enez-Das ı, Guerrero, & Harris, 2005), Greek Orthodox children (Makris & Pnevmatikos, 2007), American children in secular or Protestant schools (Lane, Wellman, & Evans, 2010, 2012, or Austrian children in Catholic schools (Kiessling & Perner, 2014), for some period during the preschool years or depending on the way in which questions are phrased, children attributed human-like limitations to God's mind.…”

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.…”

The supernatural guilt trip does not take us far enough

“…In a recent study, Barrett et al (2001) report that because, theologically, God is all-knowing and therefore cannot hold false beliefs (and therefore cannot be deceived), the social cognitive systems of young children may be better suited to reasoning about the culturally postulated mind of God than about the epistemologically limited minds of humans and other animals. For example, whilst 3-year-olds incorrectly reason that a naïve person knows the true contents of an inaccurately labeled box, they correctly reason (at least, in a theological sense) that God knows the true contents as well.…”