The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity.

Bering, Jesse M.; Bjorklund, David F.

doi:10.1037/0012-1649.40.2.217

Cited by 301 publications

(267 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Even so, there was an age-related improvement over the elementary-school years. Although the current findings are in accord with recent work (Bering & Bjorklund, 2004;Slaughter & Lyons, 2003), they contrast with much of the early literature. The earlier research concluded that children do not have mastery of death concepts until about the middle of the elementary-school years and that human death is treated differently from the death of other species (e.g., Lazar & Torney-Purta, 1991).…”

Section: Death Conceptscontrasting

confidence: 55%

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Are dinosaurs the rule or the exception?Developing concepts of death and extinction

Poling

2004

Cognitive Development

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The development of concepts of individual death and species extinction were examined in two studies. Sixty-eight, 4-to 9-year-old children and their parents participated in Study 1. Although preschoolers had some understanding of the concept of death, the ability to explain death and extinction improved over the school-age years. However, all age groups were reluctant to accept that extinction may be inevitable for all species, despite the ease with which they accepted death as inevitable for all living beings. This resistance was especially strong in the case of human extinction. Study 2 extended these findings with three groups of adults possessing different degrees of biological expertise. Unlike medical students and lay-adults, evolutionary biologists endorsed the inevitability of extinction and generalized this belief to humans. The results suggest that for the lay-public, death and extinction concepts elicit existential concerns and that they are embedded in potentially conflicting intuitive theories: metaphysics and biology.

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Section: Death Conceptscontrasting

confidence: 55%

“…Western children acquire a mature understanding of death somewhere between 6 years of age (Bering & Bjorklund, 2004;Evans, Poling, & Mull, 2001;Slaughter & Lyons, 2003) and 10 years of age (e.g., Lazar & Torney-Purta, 1991).…”

Section: Understanding Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are dinosaurs the rule or the exception?Developing concepts of death and extinction

Poling

2004

Cognitive Development

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“…Like Evans & Wellman, Harris & Astuti state that their own research programme on the development of afterlife beliefs reveals a set of findings that in many ways contradicts the developmental trajectory reported by Bering and Bjorklund (2004), or at least tells a more complicated story, with religious testimony and cultural exposure encouraging such beliefs. Again, however, it is difficult to compare findings across these studies.…”

Section: R43 Methodological Concerns Presently Limit Theoretical Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Representations of the afterlife are culturally recurrent, proximally driven by emotions, frequently implicated in social and reproductive matters, and superficially fitted to the ecological niche in which the human organism develops (Bering & Bjorklund 2004;Dechesne et al 2003;Reynolds & Tanner 1995). These features are consistent with what we know about the nature of psychological adaptations (Bjorklund & Pellegrini 2002;Tooby & Cosmides 1992).…”

Section: By-product Versus Functional Analyses Of Belief In Immortal mentioning

confidence: 99%

The supernatural guilt trip does not take us far enough

Gjersoe

Hood

2006

Behav Brain Sci

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The present article examines how people's belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one's afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is "like" to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people's interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive "system" dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment.

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“…On the strength of recent findings by Bering and his colleagues (Bering, 2007;Bering & Bjorklund, 2004;Bering, Hernández-Blasi & Bjorklund, 2005), one could argue that the idea that dead agents preserve their mental faculties is not acquired through enculturation at all, but is the natural output of a default cognitive stance. On this account, younger children should be more likely than adults to endorse the survival of dead agents' minds because their natural intuition is still unconstrained by the understanding of death as a biological phenomenon.…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Mortality and the Life of the Ancestors in Rural Madagascar

2008

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Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8-17 years) and adults (19-71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The death in question was presented in the context of a narrative that focused either on the corpse or on the ancestral practices associated with the afterlife. Participants aged 8 years and older claimed that death brings an end to most bodily and mental processes. Nevertheless, particularly in the context of the religious narrative, they claimed that certain mental processes continue even after death. This assertion of an afterlife was more evident among adults than children, especially with respect to cognitive processes, such as knowing and remembering. In Study 2, 5-and 7-year-olds were asked similar questions in connection with the death of a bird and a person. Seven-year-olds consistently claimed that bodily and mental processes cease at death, whereas 5-year-olds were unsystematic in their replies. Together, the two studies replicate and extend findings obtained with Western children showing that, in the course of development, different conceptions of death are elaborated-a biological conception in which death terminates living processes and a religious conception in which death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence.

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The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity.

Cited by 301 publications

References 41 publications

Are dinosaurs the rule or the exception?Developing concepts of death and extinction

Are dinosaurs the rule or the exception?Developing concepts of death and extinction

The supernatural guilt trip does not take us far enough

Understanding Mortality and the Life of the Ancestors in Rural Madagascar

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