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Weisman K, Ghossainy ME, Williams AJ, Payir A, Lesage KA, Reyes-Jaquez B, Amin TG, Anggoro FK, Burdett ERR, Chen EE, Coetzee L, Coley JD, Dahl A, Dautel JB, Davis HE, Davis EL, Diesendruck G, Evans D, Feeney A, Gurven M, Jee BD, Kramer HJ, Kushnir T, Kyriakopoulou N, McAuliffe K, McLaughlin A, Nichols S, Nicolopoulou A, Rockers PC, Shneidman L, Skopeliti I, Srinivasan M, Tarullo AR, Taylor LK, Yu Y, Yucel M, Zhao X, Corriveau KH, Richert RA. The development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior: Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network. PLoS One 2024; 19:e0292755. [PMID: 38457421 PMCID: PMC10923471 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0292755] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/29/2022] [Accepted: 09/27/2023] [Indexed: 03/10/2024] Open
Abstract
The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural transmission in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's first wave of data collection, which aims to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior. This work is guided by three key research questions: (1) How do children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents? (2) How do children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity? (3) How are religious and supernatural beliefs transmitted within and between generations? The protocol is designed to address these questions via a set of nine tasks for children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, a comprehensive survey completed by their parents/caregivers, and a task designed to elicit conversations between children and caregivers. This study is being conducted in 39 distinct cultural-religious groups (to date), spanning 17 countries and 13 languages. In this manuscript, we provide detailed descriptions of all elements of this study protocol, give a brief overview of the ways in which this protocol has been adapted for use in diverse religious communities, and present the final, English-language study materials for 6 of the 39 cultural-religious groups who are currently being recruited for this study: Protestant Americans, Catholic Americans, American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, and religiously unaffiliated Americans.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kara Weisman
- Department of Psychology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, California, United States of America
| | - Maliki E. Ghossainy
- Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Allison J. Williams
- Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Ayse Payir
- Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Kirsten A. Lesage
- Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Bolivar Reyes-Jaquez
- Department of Psychology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, California, United States of America
| | - Tamer G. Amin
- Department of Education, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
| | - Florencia K. Anggoro
- Department of Psychology, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | | | - Eva E. Chen
- College of Education, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
| | - Lezanie Coetzee
- Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HE2RO), T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- School of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
| | - John D. Coley
- Department of Psychology, College of Science, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Audun Dahl
- Department of Psychology, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, United States of America
| | - Jocelyn B. Dautel
- School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom
| | - Helen Elizabeth Davis
- School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
- Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Elizabeth L. Davis
- Department of Psychology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, California, United States of America
| | - Gil Diesendruck
- Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
| | - Denise Evans
- Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HE2RO), T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- School of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
| | - Aidan Feeney
- School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom
| | - Michael Gurven
- Department of Anthropology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America
| | - Benjamin D. Jee
- Department of Psychology, Worcester State University, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Hannah J. Kramer
- School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom
| | - Tamar Kushnir
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
| | - Natassa Kyriakopoulou
- Department of Early Childhood Education, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
| | - Katherine McAuliffe
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Abby McLaughlin
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Shaun Nichols
- Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America
| | - Ageliki Nicolopoulou
- Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States of America
| | - Peter C. Rockers
- Department of Global Health, School of Public Health, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Laura Shneidman
- Department of Psychology, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington, United States of America
| | - Irini Skopeliti
- Department of Educational Science and Early Childhood Education, University of Patras, Patras, Greece
| | - Mahesh Srinivasan
- Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America
| | - Amanda R. Tarullo
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Laura K. Taylor
- School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland
| | - Yue Yu
- Centre for Research in Child Development, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
| | - Meltem Yucel
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
| | - Xin Zhao
- Department of Educational Psychology, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
| | - Kathleen H. Corriveau
- Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Rebekah A. Richert
- Department of Psychology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, California, United States of America
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Davoodi T, Jamshidi-Sianaki M, Payir A, Cui YK, Clegg J, McLoughlin N, Harris PL, Corriveau KH. Miraculous, magical, or mundane? The development of beliefs about stories with divine, magical, or realistic causation. Mem Cognit 2023; 51:695-707. [PMID: 35192175 DOI: 10.3758/s13421-021-01270-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 12/19/2021] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
Children's naïve theories about causal regularities enable them to differentiate factual narratives describing real events and characters from fictional narratives describing made-up events and characters (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, Cognition 113 (2): 213-225, 2009). But what happens when children are consistently presented with accounts of miraculous and causally impossible events as real occurrences? Previous research has shown that preschoolers with consistent exposure to religious teaching tend to systematically judge characters involved in fantastical or religious events as real (Corriveau et al., Cognitive Science, 39 (2), 353-382, 2015; Davoodi et al., Developmental Psychology, 52 (2), 221, 2016). In the current study, we extended this line of work by asking about the scope of the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments. Specifically, we asked whether this effect is domain-general or domain-specific. We tested children in Iran, where regular exposure to uniform religious beliefs might influence children's reasoning about possibility in non-religious domains, in addition to the domain of religion. Children with no or minimal schooling (5- to 6-year-olds) and older elementary school students (9- to 10-year-olds) judged the reality status of different kinds of stories, notably realistic, unusual (but nonetheless realistic), religious, and magical stories. We found that while younger children were not systematic in their judgments, older children often judged religious stories as real but rarely judged magical stories as real. This developmental pattern suggests that the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments does not extend beyond their reasoning about divine intervention. Children's justifications for their reality judgments provided further support for this domain-specific influence of religious teaching.
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