Journal ArticleDOI
Religious testimony in a secular society: Belief in unobservable entities among Chinese parents and their children.
Yixin Kelly Cui,Jennifer M. Clegg,Eleanor Fang Yan,Telli Davoodi,Paul L. Harris,Kathleen H. Corriveau +5 more
TLDR
The results indicate that children's religious beliefs are related to the beliefs of their parents, even when those beliefs go against the majority view.Abstract:
When learning about the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena such as germs or religious phenomena such as God, children are receptive to the testimony of other people. Research in Western cultures has shown that by 5 to 6 years of age, children-like adults-are confident about the existence of both scientific and religious phenomena. We examined the beliefs of secular and Christian children growing up in China as well as the beliefs of their parents. All participants-secular and Christian children, as well as their parents-were confident about the existence of the scientific phenomena. No such consensus emerged for religious phenomena. Whereas secular children and their parents were skeptical, Christian children and their parents were confident about the existence of the religious phenomena. Moreover, a similar pattern was found for Christian children in preschools and for Christian children with more extensive exposure to the secular state curriculum. Indeed, for religious phenomena, a positive association was found between the beliefs of Christian children and their parents, highlighting the potential influence of parental input in a predominantly secular society. Overall, the results indicate that children's religious beliefs are related to the beliefs of their parents, even when those beliefs go against the majority view. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Beliefs of children and adults in religious and scientific phenomena.
TL;DR: Within the domains of both science and religion, beliefs in unobservable phenomena - such as bacteria or the soul - are common, and when individuals are invited to indicate the basis for their beliefs within each domain, a surprisingly similar pattern of justification is apparent.
Journal ArticleDOI
Epistemic justifications for belief in the unobservable: The impact of minority status.
Telli Davoodi,Yixin Kelly Cui,Jennifer M. Clegg,Fang E. Yan,Ayse Payir,Paul L. Harris,Kathleen H. Corriveau +6 more
TL;DR: The results show that under certain circumstances - notably when holding minority beliefs - tracking the source of beliefs serves as a central epistemic justification.
Journal ArticleDOI
Beliefs about Unobservable Scientific and Religious Entities are Transmitted via Subtle Linguistic Cues in Parental Testimony
TL;DR: The authors explored the role of parental testimony in children's developing beliefs about the ontological status of typically unobservable phenomena and found that parents and their 5- to 7-year-old children (N ǫ = 25 ) were more likely to report that the ontology status of a phenomenon was unknown to them.
Book
The Science of Children's Religious and Spiritual Development
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a comprehensive yet concise account of scientific research on children's religious and spiritual development and highlight the need for more research that discriminates specific positive and negative manifestations of RS for children's development.
Journal ArticleDOI
Faith and science mindsets as predictors of COVID-19 concern: A three-wave longitudinal study
TL;DR: This paper found that science mindsets increased whereas faith mindsets decreased during the early months of the pandemic and that science mindset was positive predictor of COVID-19 concern, while faith mindset was negative predictor of science mindset.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Language Attitudes and Heritage Language Maintenance among Chinese Immigrant Families in the USA.
TL;DR: This paper investigated attitudes toward heritage language maintenance among Chinese immigrant parents and their second-generation children and found that while the Chinese parents value their HL as a resource and take positive actions to maintain the HL in the next generation, the children fail to see the relevance of HL learning in their life and often resist parents' efforts in HL maintenance.
Journal ArticleDOI
The apple does not fall far from the tree, or does it? A meta-analysis of parent-child similarity in intergroup attitudes.
Juliane Degner,Jonas Dalege +1 more
TL;DR: This meta-analysis integrates the available empirical evidence of the past 60 years and critically discusses the current state of knowledge on parental socialization of intergroup attitudes to demonstrate that parent-child attitudes are related throughout childhood and adolescence.
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Improbable or Impossible? How Children Reason About the Possibility of Extraordinary Events
Andrew Shtulman,Susan Carey +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that children initially mistake their inability to imagine circumstances that would allow an event to occur for evidence that no such circumstances exist, and develop possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8.
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Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony
TL;DR: As they age, children's reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Germs and angels: the role of testimony in young children's ontology
TL;DR: In three experiments, children's reliance on other people's testimony as compared to their own, first- hand experience was assessed in the domain of ontology, confirming that children's ontological claims extend beyond their first-hand encounters with instances of a given category.