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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The politics of culture or a contest of histories: Representations of Chinese popular religion
Stephan Feuchtwang,Wang Mingming +1 more
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Is the bias for function-based explanations culturally universal? Children from China endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena.
TL;DR: Evidence is found that children's bias for teleological explanations is not solely a product of Western Abrahamic cultures, Instead, it extends to other cultures, including the East Asian secular culture of modern-day China.
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God, Germs, and Evolution: Belief in Unobservable Religious and Scientific Entities in the U.S. and China
TL;DR: Adults in the U.S. and China were asked to make judgments about the existence of a variety of scientific and religious entities, including God, germs, and evolution, and overall, participants expressed more confidence in theexistence of scientific as compared to religious entities.
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The development of children's concepts of invisibility
TL;DR: Investigating the invisibility concepts of 47 3-7-year-olds showed that children's concepts of visibility and reality status are intertwined, and that an understanding that some entities are impossible to see develops between the ages of 3 and 7.
Journal ArticleDOI
"I Believe in Cusk": The Effect of Explicit Belief Statements on Children's Reality Status Judgments and Beliefs about Consensus.
TL;DR: This paper investigated how implicit belief statements affect children's beliefs and found that children made reality status judgments and consensus judgments (i.e., whether people agree about the entity's existence) when they were shown videos of their parent providing either explicit (Cusk is real) or implicit belief testimony about novel entities.