Children Doubt Magic but Believe in Miracles
– by Ayse Payir and Paul L. Harris
Young children are typically seen as naturally credulous beings, endowed with a rich imagination and incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. Given that they believe in entities like Santa, create imaginary friends, and fear monsters under the bed, this common stereotype is hard to dismiss.
In line with this stereotype, an early claim in developmental psychology was that young children are prone to magical thinking. Piaget argued that children’s magical thinking arises from the lack of any boundary between their mind and the outside world, so that the content of their mental world—dreams, emotions, imaginings—spill over into their ideas about physical reality. He proposed that children’s animism—their tendency to attribute mental states to inanimate beings—and artificialism—their tendency to think that natural phenomena are created to serve a purpose—are two manifestations of this spillover. So, according to a young child, clouds “…come from the smoke that people make in their chimneys…to make it rain for the gardens,” and clouds “… move because they want to make it rain somewhere else.” (Piaget, 1929). Gradually, such magical explanations are replaced with naturalistic explanations based on cause and effect: The clouds move “…because of the wind. The air moves and pushes the clouds along.”
Are children prone to magical causality?
Piaget’s proposal was initially challenged by Huang (1930) and Mead (1932), who showed that children provide very prosaic explanations even for events that violate their expectations. For example, in one study Huang covered a tube filled with water with a piece of paper over the mouth and quickly turned it upside down. When the water did not spill out (due to air pressure), children explained this seemingly strange event with natural rather than magical causation, arguing, for instance, that there must something sticky on the paper or at the rim of the tube which prevents the water to escape. Similarly, when Mead (1932) asked Manus children in Papua New Guinea to speculate about the cause of some unusual outcomes—such as a canoe escaping its moorings overnight—children typically invoked explanations that are quite mundane: Perhaps the owner did not tie up the canoe properly.
Decades later Hickling and Wellman (2001) reached similar conclusions when they analyzed children’s spontaneous causal explanations across a range of phenomena (e.g., objects, animals, humans) in everyday conversations. These explanations were not always factually correct, but they were consistent with the relevant domain and rarely involved magic. For example, children made a clear distinction between living versus nonliving beings and offered biological explanations for the former but not for the latter.
In a more recent study, we found further evidence for this naturalistic outlook (Payir et al., 2022). We presented children with short stories in which the main character experienced a bad outcome. For example, in one story a farmer ended up with a poor crop. When asked how the farmer could have avoided this bad outcome, children invoked realistic rather than supernatural or miraculous possibilities—for example “he could have watered the plants more”—and they did this regardless of their religious background, be it secular or religious.
In summary, recent research portrays children as rational, down-to-earth thinkers rather than muddled fantasists.
Are children natural-born believers?
If children are truly skeptical about magical causes, why do they believe in supernatural forces, such as divine agency? Maybe children are ‘born believers’ who are predisposed to invoke supernatural agency. Within the Cognitive Science of Religion framework researchers proposed children’s endorsement of God’s extraordinary powers (Barrett et al., 2001) and their tendency to entertain an afterlife (e.g., Bering, 2006) as evidence for this provocative claim. However, later studies showed that children attribute no extraordinary powers to God before the age of 5 to 7 (Heiphetz et al., 2016; Lane, 2021; Makris & Pnevmatikos, 2007) and initially endorse an irreligious, biological account of death (Harris & Giménez, 2005; Lane et al., 2016; Watson-Jones et al., 2017). By implication, children are not ‘born believers.’
A compelling case for young children’s belief in the divine was provided by Kelemen. Drawing on Piaget’s argument of young children’s artificialism (1929), Kelemen (2004) claimed that children have a natural inclination to ‘promiscuous teleology’—to think that everything in the natural world is created for a purpose by a divine being. Kelemen provided persuasive cross-cultural evidence that children do indeed think teleologically, but only children exposed to religion invoke a divine agent in doing so (Kelemen & DiYanni, 2005; Schachner et al., 2017). Essentially, children’s tendency to invoke a divine creator appears to be based on cultural learning rather than any innate tendency.
How do children learn to believe?
If children eventually come to believe that God exists via cultural learning, what exactly makes them endorse this claim, which is hard to verify? Anthropologist Henrich (2009) argued that unverifiable claims are not convincing unless accompanied by behaviors that enhance their credibility, for example, actions that pose obvious costs to the believer—such as ascetism, tithing or fasting. Such actions speak louder than words. Supporting Henrich’s proposal, various studies with adults indicate a strong relation between parental displays of religiosity during childhood and conviction in adulthood (e.g., Gervais & Najle, 2015; Willard & Cingl 2017).
Further support for the key role of cultural learning comes from developmental research on the role of testimony in learning about hard-to-observe phenomena. Studies indicate that across the world, children’s and adults’ belief in such phenomena—be they scientific, such as germs, or religious, such as God—vary based on the community consensus surrounding those phenomena (Ma et al., 2024). Accordingly, even in highly religious communities like Iran, there is greater confidence in the existence of scientific entities—whose existence is generally taken for granted—as compared to religious entities—for which the community consensus is less secure. Studies analyzing parent-child conversations show that this differential confidence is reflected in parental talk: Even religious parents talk about religious entities with less certainty as compared to scientific entities, and such linguistic cues moderate children’s level of confidence, providing direct evidence for the transmission of beliefs via testimony (McLoughlin et al., 2021; 2023).
In sum, scientific evidence casts doubt on the stereotype of the child as “magical thinker,” and suggests instead that children are naturalistic thinkers when left to their own devices. Nevertheless, they learn about supernatural possibilities, such as divine agency and the afterlife, from others in their family and immediate community. Exactly why such cultural learning is so potent remains an intriguing question that we hope to tackle in future research. (1083 words)
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