Children Exposed To Religion Have Difficulty Distinguishing Fact From Fiction, Study Finds

[cleanhippie]

Young children who are exposed to religion have a hard time differentiating between fact and fiction, according to a new study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science.

Researchers presented 5- and 6-year-old children from both public and parochial schools with three different types of stories -- religious, fantastical and realistic –- in an effort to gauge how well they could identify narratives with impossible elements as fictional.

The study found that, of the 66 participants, children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school were significantly less able than secular children to identify supernatural elements, such as talking animals, as fictional.

By relating seemingly impossible religious events achieved through divine intervention (e.g., Jesus transforming water into wine) to fictional narratives, religious children would more heavily rely on religion to justify their false categorizations.

“In both studies, [children exposed to religion] were less likely to judge the characters in the fantastical stories as pretend, and in line with this equivocation, they made more appeals to reality and fewer appeals to impossibility than did secular children,” the study concluded.

Refuting previous hypotheses claiming that children are “born believers,” the authors suggest that “religious teaching, especially exposure to miracle stories, leads children to a more generic receptivity toward the impossible, that is, a more wide-ranging acceptance that the impossible can happen in defiance of ordinary causal relations.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/21/children-religion-fact-fiction_n_5607009.html

Wow, who could have guessed it?

[ladjf]

1. Child abuse. nt

[AtheistCrusader]

15. +1

[edhopper]

2. People who believe in God

and that any of the stories from the Bible are true, have a hard time distinguishing fact from fiction.

[cleanhippie]

3. We see that to be the case right here, ed.

Sadly.

[SheilaT]

4. Another huge problem I see with religion

is that studying the Bible (or any of the other holy books) encourages a short attention span. There is no sustained narrative of any kind. No wonder those who self identify as religious don't believe in things like global warming, because it can't be explained in 25 words or less. In fact, all science requires a fairly long attention span. As do lots of other intellectual pursuits. But if your world view is that everything can be explained or solved by reciting some brief excerpt from your holy book, you're not going to be able to understand complex problems.

[cleanhippie]

5. I never thought to look at scripture as the original Twitter...

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Yes but you're gonna die and that's scary so

-gotta go with sky daddy gonna save us.

Or so I've read right here.

[mr blur]

7. I'm shocked - shocked, I tell you!

I wonder, have they done a similar study on adults? Presidential candidates, for example?

[Binkie The Clown]

8. That explains why so many of them are Republicans.

The Republicans make a career out of ignoring reality in favor of ideological fantasies.

[NeoGreen]

9. Some great excerpts from the orginal paper...

First the Abstract:

In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion. Children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children’s upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic (Study 1) or without reference to magic (Study 2). Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.

Followed by detailed descriptions of the studies and how they were conducted,

Then a review and analysis of the data...with charts and tables... (all standard sciencey kind of writing and stuff...)

And then the general discussion:
(I didn't have enough time this morning to make a detailed and complete review of the paper, so I just pulled out the "juicy bits".)

The findings for the other two types of story-based characters—those embedded in religious and fantastical stories—varied sharply across children. Secular children growing up in non-churchgoing families and attending a public school responded very differently from religious children growing up with exposure to religious teaching (either by attending a parochial school or by attending church with their family, or both).

This in of itself is interesting, that by the age of 5 or 6 it is possible to distinguish between secular (non-church) public-school attending children and their peers who are exposed to religion, by a cognitive test.

But there is more...

Considering first the characters embedded in religious stories, secular children categorized these characters as pretend. Very few categorized them as real and of those that did, none made any reference to God. Indeed, whenever these secular children did refer to religion—which they sometimes did in the context of the religious stories—it was to justify a decision that the character was pretend. By contrast, the other three groups of children systematically judged the characters in the religious stories to be real. Moreover, (...snip...) all three groups of religious children often made an appeal to religion in the case of Study 1. In other words, although the characters in the religious stories were implicated in ordinarily impossible events, namely miracles, all three religious groups invoked God as a justification for categorizing those figures as real, whereas their secular peers invoked God as a justification for categorizing those figures as pretend.

Underline and Bold emphasis is mine.

Holy cow!

By age 5 or 6, secular raised kids can grasp concept that the idea known as "god" is just adults saying, "pretend".

as stated in a more complete form in the study...

...secular children displayed little recognition of God’s special powers. When presented with religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events, they categorized the protagonists as pretend. Moreover, they rarely referred to religion in their justifications. Secular children offered no justifications referring to religion for the realistic and fantastical stories. Even for the religious stories, only a minority of their justifications (26%) referred to religion, and in all of these latter justifications, they referred to religion to justify their categorization of the central character as pretend rather than as real. They adopted a dichotomous and essentially secular view of narratives and their characters, thinking of them as either fictional or factual. Contrary to what might be expected if children were “born believers” (Barrett, 2012) or possessed a “belief instinct” (Bering, 2011), they treated stories of the miraculous as akin to fairy stories. Indeed, some secular children displayed an attitude of active skepticism toward religion. They referred to God to justify their categorization of a story protagonist as pretend.

Very cool.

[trotsky]

10. It's not a coincidence that so many of the lunatic right are so religious. n/t

[Warren Stupidity]

11. not just children

[cleanhippie]

12. Sadly, that is true

You can see it right here all the time.

[rug]

13. This was discsssed last year when it was originaly published.

Do you have any recent studies on distinguishing one year from the other?

[Lordquinton]

14. It's a lack of critical thinking skills

When you're taught to accept something as true or else then you tend to not question other aspects of life.