What could have been done? Counterfactual alternatives to negative outcomes generated by religious and secular children.

Abstract

Recent research has shown that a religious upbringing renders children receptive to ordinarily impossible outcomes, but the underlying mechanism for this effect remains unclear. Exposure to religious teachings might alter children’s basic understanding of causality. Alternatively, religious exposure might only affect children’s religious cognition, not their causal judgments more generally. To test between these possibilities, 6- to 11-year-old children attending either secular (n = 49, 51% female, primarily White and middle-class) or parochial schools (n = 42, 48% female, primarily White and middle-class) heard stories in which characters experienced negative outcomes and indicated how those characters could have prevented them. Both groups of children spontaneously invoked interventions consistent with natural causal laws. Similarly, when judging the plausibility of several counterfactual interventions, participants endorsed the intervention consistent with natural laws at high levels, irrespective of schooling. However, children’s endorsement of supernatural interventions inconsistent with these laws revealed both group similarities and differences. Although both groups of children judged divine intervention (i.e., via prayer) as more plausible than mental (i.e., via wishing) and magical (i.e., via magical powers) interventions, children receiving religious (vs. secular) schooling were more likely to do so. Moreover, although children with a secular upbringing overwhelmingly chose naturalistic interventions as the most effective, children with a religious upbringing chose divine as well as naturalistic intervention. These results indicate that religious teaching does not alter children’s basic understanding of causality but rather adds divine intervention to their repertoire of possible causal factors.

Asking God for Help: Children’s Views on What to Pray for When

“…Children also demonstrate an increased belief that prayer will work between the ages of 4 and 8 (Woolley and Phelps 2001). Children between the ages of 6 and 11 from varied religious backgrounds in the United States indicate prayer would be more effective than wishing or magic to prevent an unwanted, negative outcome from occurring (Payir et al 2022). However, between the ages of 3 and 11, children from varied religious backgrounds in the United States are also more likely to claim that events that are probable are more likely to occur through prayer than events that are physically impossible (Lane 2020).…”

“…Religions 2023, 14, 1164 2 of 18 Furthermore, studies documented the conditions under which God would likely answer a prayer, based on the content of the prayer (Woolley and Phelps 2001), whether the request is for something that is improbable or impossible (Lane 2020;Payir et al 2022), or even whether prayers are silent or spoken out loud (Lane et al 2016). However, little is known about what kinds of things children believe God actually does to fulfill or answer a prayer.…”

Development of Religious Cognition

“…Similarly, studies have examined the kinds of ideas children propose when asked to consider what could have been done to prevent or change the outcome of an event (i.e., counterfactual alternatives). Although both religious and nonreligious children appeal to natural causes as the primary mechanism considered, religious children are also significantly more likely to view supernatural causes as an equally plausible alternative (Payir et al 2022). With age, children increasingly engage in probabilistic reasoning to make inferences about the likelihood of a causal mechanism resulting in a desired action; nevertheless, religious children view religious mechanisms such as praying as more probable than similar nonreligious acts (e.g., wishing; Lane 2020).…”

From Charitable Inference to Active Credence

“…In addition, even when children are asked to evaluate the plausibility of preventive measures presented to them by an adult rather than generated by their own reflection, they typically endorse the efficacy of naturalistic interventions. Nonetheless, religious children, unlike their secular peers, occasionally endorse the efficacy of divine intervention (Payir et al 2022). In sum, whether children are asked to assess the real-world plausibility of a sequence of events, or to imagine how it might have turned out differently, their primary recourse is to naturalistic thinking.…”