Santa Is More Real Than Peter Pan: Children Have A “Hierarchy” Of Belief In Fictional Characters

By Emily Reynolds The creeping realisation that Santa isn’t real can be a watershed moment — not quite an entry into adulthood, but certainly a step in its direction. But “real” and “not real” are not the only two categories that children have when it comes to cultural figures, according to a new study in PLOS ONE. Rather than a black-and-white model, Rohan Kapitány and colleagues propose a “sensible hierarchy” of belief in various figures, finding that cultural rites and norms for those figures play a big part in its creation. Even very young children are capable of understanding the difference between real and non-real characters. But there are various factors that can convince them that a figure is real: testimony from others such as parents; indirect evidence like chocolate eggs or money left under a pillow; direct evidence like seeing a shopping centre Santa; and engagement in rituals — leaving cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve, for example. To understand how children conceptualise and sort real from non-real figures, the researchers first asked 95 Australian children aged between two and eleven to rate the realness of 12 target figures on a scale from zero to eight. These included both real people (e.g. the kids’ band The Wiggles), and fictional figures (e.g. Santa, unicorns, and Harry Potter), as well as more ambiguous figures like aliens and dinosaurs. Adult participants also answered the same questions as part of a separate s...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Source Type: blogs