Mom Knows More than a Little Ghost
Children's Attributions of Beliefs to God, the Living, and the Dead
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3267073 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dawoon Jung (0000-0001-5193-3626, Ewha Womans University), Euisun Kim (Ewha Womans University), Sung-Ho Kim (0000-0002-2808-2293, Ewha Womans University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 68 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/rel16010068 |
| OpenAlex | W4406243640 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
The growing body of research on children's understanding of extraordinary minds has demonstrated that children believe in the persistence of mental functioning after death. However, beyond the continuity of mind, the supernatural conception of death often involves the concept of the disembodied mind, which transcends the constraints of the physical body, possessing supernatural mental capacities. The current study investigated whether children differentiate between a dead agent's mind and ordinary minds in terms of their perceptual and information-updating capacities. In a location-change false-belief task, which involved a story of a mouse protagonist that was either eaten by an alligator or not, 4- to 6-year-old Korean children (N = 114) were asked about the mental states of the protagonist, an ordinary adult (mom), and God. The results showed (1) older children's tendency to respond in a way that differentiated (the living) mom from the dead protagonist, (2) an increasing trend of differentiating God's super-knowingness from ordinary minds with age, and (3) inconclusive evidence regarding children's differential responses to the dead versus living protagonist. This study suggests that children are not predisposed to view dead agents as possessing a disembodied and supernatural mind, highlighting the importance of cultural learning in the development of such religious concepts
Attribution · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Psychology · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Social Psychology · Theology and Philosophy of Evil
Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity
Beliefs about beliefs [P&W, SR&B]
Causes and consequences of mind perception
The folk psychology of souls
Three‐year‐olds' difficulty with false belief
Meta-Analysis of Theory-of-Mind Development
The Causes and Consequences of a Need for Self-Esteem
Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing
Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?
Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items
How people perceive the minds of the dead
The minds of God, mortals, and in-betweens
In Gods We Trust
Introducing Anthropology of Religion
The deification of historical figures and the emergence of priesthoods as a solution to a network coordination problem
Animals, Superman, Fairy and God
Children's Acceptance of Conflicting Testimony
When Seeing Is Not Believing
Descartes' Mistake
Yukatek Maya Children's Attributions of Belief to Natural and Non-natural Entities
What Do Invisible Friends Know? Imaginary Companions, God, and Theory of Mind
Research
The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity
Treating stimuli as a random factor in social psychology
Religion is natural
Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents' Minds
Understanding Mortality and the Life of the Ancestors in Rural Madagascar
Cognitive Science of Religion
Growing Up Thinking of God's Beliefs
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |