Jaswal (2004) found that 3- and 4-year-olds pay attention to adults’ intentional cues when determining whether their testimony is veridical. Recent work, however, indicates that children do not, in fact, believe everything adults tell them, but instead display limits to their credulity ( Jaswal, 2004 Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004 Lee, Cameron, Doucette, & Talwar, 2002). The underlying claim is that children are fundamentally different from adults in their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality ( cf. ‘Do not swim in that lake, there are alligators in it that might eat you.’) but also results in beliefs in fantastical beings and a variety of other non-truths. According to Dawkins (1995), young children’s credulity promotes rapid learning of important safety rules (e.g. The traditional explanation of the prevalence of fantasy beliefs in early childhood is that young children have limited first-hand experience of the world and little understanding of physical causality and therefore accept adults’ explanations of novel events without question ( Dawkins, 1995 Piaget, 1929 cf. (1978) found that 85% of 4-year-olds but only 65% of 6-year-olds and 25% of 8-year-olds expressed firm belief in Santa Claus. However, belief in such figures declines steadily in the early elementary school years. In the US, many young children believe in the existence of fantasy figures such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy ( Prentice, Manosevitz, & Hubbs, 1978 Rosengren, Kalish, Hickling, & Gelman, 1994 Sharon & Woolley, 2004). In other instances, misinformation is provided by parents who seek to enhance what they see as the wonder of childhood, which is one of the reasons they encourage their young children to believe in fantastical beings ( Clark, 1995). Such well-intended parental misinformation may be used to ensure children’s compliance with safety rules, morals, and other behavioural standards. In fact, children are often deliberately misled, albeit in what the misleaders believe to be their best interests (see, e.g. Because children often rely on testimony from others, they face the possibility of misinformation. Rather, children often rely on indirect sources of evidence, such as clues, inferences, and the verbal testimony of others to come to conclusions about the way the world works ( Harris, 2002 Harris, Pasquini, Duke, Ascher, & Pons, 2006). Much of what children learn about the world is not the result of direct first-hand experience.
The discussion presents a new proposal for the trajectory from belief to disbelief and an updated perspective on the role of individual differences in belief.
First year belief status was not related to age, but older children from the stable belief group were more likely than younger children to disbelieve 1-year later. First year results revealed three patterns of belief: stable belief, wavering belief and stable non-belief. Stability of belief was assessed over the course of 3 weeks and again 1-year later. Short-term belief was predicted by an interaction of age, existing beliefs in fantastical figures, and whether the child was ‘visited’ by the Candy Witch. The present study probes factors associated with belief in a novel fantastical figure, the Candy Witch, that 3- to 7-year-olds heard about at school. Nonetheless, many children accept fantastical beings as real based on misleading testimony. Recent research indicates that preschoolers make sophisticated choices in accepting testimony as a source of knowledge.
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