Children’s understanding of reality and possibility and its cultural transmission mechanisms

When learning about concepts that are difficult to experience first-hand, children must rely on information from others. One challenge for young children is that adults may provide differing information, yet few studies have examined how children reconcile conflicting beliefs from different sources. Across three studies, I explored children’s understanding of reality and possibility in natural and supernatural domains from secular and Christian communities in a largely secular society, Mainland China. Two age groups were included, one group before formal schooling (5- to 6-year-olds), where children are mainly exposed to testimony from parents and their immediate circle, and one group after several years of schooling (9- to 11-year-olds), where the testimony from parents may support or conflict with school testimony. Specifically, in Study 1, children and their parents were asked to judge the existence of unobservable scientific and religious entities. Results showed that the ontological judgments of children from both age groups were in strong correspondence with their parents’ beliefs, even when parental testimony may conflict with the testimony children receive in school. Study 2 expanded beyond Study 1 to explore children’s understanding of fact and fiction in counter-intuitive processes. Study 2 also asked whether religious exposure from the immediate circle in a largely secular society may extend Christian children’s understanding of possibility in formal religious contexts to folk religious contexts, fantastical contexts or improbable contexts in general. It was found that with age, Christian Chinese children became less likely to extend their belief in the impossible via God’s intervention to other magical or divine powers. Lastly, Study 3 examined and revealed the specific elements of parental testimony that might alert children to the existence or non-existence of unobservable concepts by analyzing parent-child conversations about unobservable scientific and religious concepts in both high consensus and low consensus domains. Taken together, Study 1 and Study 2 demonstrated the weight of testimony from parents and the immediate community on children’s understanding of possibility and facts when there is conflicting testimony in the larger society. Study 3 provided evidence on parental testimony as one possible cultural transmission mechanism. The final chapter addresses the significance and implications of these findings in the field of developmental science and education

Parents’ beliefs about their influence on children’s scientific and religious views: Perspectives from Iran, China and the United States

Parents in Iran, China and the United States were asked 1) about their potential influence on their children's religious and scientific views and 2) to consider a situation in which their children expressed dissent. The Iranian and US parents endorsed their influence on children's beliefs in both domains. By contrast, Chinese parents claimed more influence in the domain of science than religion. Most parents spoke of influencing their children via Parent-only mechanisms in each domain (e.g., discussion, teaching), although US parents did spontaneously note Multiple sources for the transmission of religious views (e.g., church, other influential adults). Parents proposed a similar stance towards children’s dissenting religious and scientific views. Chinese and US parents were more likely to express Supportive approaches and Iranian parents were more likely to express a Directive approach by comparison. The present research informs our understanding of the cultural transmission of views about science and religion

Children’s ideas about what can really happen: The impact of age and religious background

Five to 11-year-old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a Divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an improbable event; and realistic stories not violating ordinary causal regularities and with no improbable event. Overall, children were less likely to judge that religious and magical stories could really happen than unusual and realistic stories although religious children were more likely than secular children to judge that religious stories could really happen. Irrespective of background, children frequently invoked causal regularities in justifying their judgments. Thus, in justifying their conclusion that a story could really happen, children often invoked a causal regularity whereas in justifying their conclusion that a story could not really happen, they often pointed to the violation of a causal regularity. Overall, the findings show that children appraise the likelihood of story events actually happening in light of their beliefs about causal regularities. A religious upbringing does not impact the frequency with which children invoke causal regularities in judging what can happen, even if it does impact the type of causal factors that children endorse

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Epistemic justifications for belief in the unobservable: The impact of minority status

Children hold beliefs about religious and scientific entities, such as angels or germs, that they cannot directly observe or interact with. Given their limited opportunities for first-hand observation, children's beliefs in these entities are a clear example of cultural learning and are likely to vary based on cultural factors. In the present study, we investigated variation in the epistemic stance of 4–11-year-old children growing up in a religious minority in China (N = 47), a religious majority in Iran (N = 85), and a religious majority in the U.S. (N = 74). To assess the role of community status as a domain-specific, as opposed to a domain-general, factor contributing to children's beliefs about unobservable entities, we compared children's beliefs about religious unobservable entities with their beliefs about scientific unobservable entities in these three communities. In all three communities, younger and older children were confident that unobservable religious and scientific entities exist. However, compared to children in Iran and the U.S., children from the religious minority group in China were more likely to justify their ontological beliefs about religious entities by appealing to the source of their beliefs. These results highlight the impact of community status on learning from testimony about unobservable entities. Additionally, the results show that under certain circumstances – notably when holding minority beliefs – tracking the source of beliefs serves as a central epistemic justification

Epistemic justifications for belief in the unobservable: The impact of minority status

Link to the journal publication: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1b11X2Hx2jDb

Miraculous, magical, or mundane? The development of beliefs about stories with divine, magical, or realistic causation

This manuscript investigates the impact of religious education on children's reality judgments

Miraculous, magical, or mundane? The development of beliefs about stories with divine, magical, or realistic causation

Children’s naïve theories about causal regularities enable them to differentiate factual narratives describing real events and characters from fictional narratives describing made-up events and characters (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, 2009). But what happens when children are consistently presented with accounts of miraculous and causally impossible events as real occurrences? Previous research has shown that preschoolers with consistent exposure to religious teaching tend to systematically judge characters involved in fantastical or religious events as real (Corriveau et al., 2015; Davoodi et al., 2016). In the current study, we extended this line of work by asking whether the scope of this influence is a domain-general effect or a domain-specific effect. We tested children in Iran, where regular exposure to uniform religious beliefs might influence children’s reasoning about possibility in non-religious domains, in addition to the domain of religion. Children with no or minimal schooling (5-6-year-olds) and older elementary school students (9-10-year-olds) judged the reality status of different kinds of stories, notably realistic, unusual (but nonetheless realistic), religious, and magical stories. We found that while younger children were not systematic in their judgments, older children often judged religious stories as real but rarely judged magical stories as real. This developmental pattern suggests that the impact of religious exposure on children’s reality judgments does not extend beyond their reasoning about divine intervention. Children’s justifications for their reality judgments provided further support for this domain-specific influence of religious teaching