\u00a0Kelly Sue DeConnick<\/a>\u00a0via flickr<\/em><\/p>\nWarning: this piece contains Christmas spoilers<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nMany of us tell our children about a rotund, bearded man in red, who lives in the icy tundra at the top of the world. He is tasked with judging the moral worth of children everywhere. He has a list. He has checked it twice. And there is no court of appeals.<\/span><\/p>\nWe promise our children that, on a known date and under the cover of darkness, he will sneak into our homes. Here, his judgment will be delivered. In preparation, it is customary to erect and decorate a tree inside one\u2019s home (a dead one, or a simulacrum, will do just fine), and to leave a food sacrifice of high-fat cookies and nutrient-rich milk. He will then repeat this act several billion times, aided by his entourage of flying polar caribou.<\/span><\/p>\nWhy would children believe something so absurd? And can it teach us anything about how children come to discriminate between what is real and what is not?<\/span><\/p>\nChildren are judicious<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nOne might be tempted to think that children are particularly susceptible to the fantastic. And while this may not be entirely unfair, children engage in a wide variety of judicious and sceptical behaviours. And compelling them to believe the fantastic without considerable effort is very difficult.<\/span><\/p>\nIn one study, known as the\u00a0\u201cPrincess Alice\u201d study, researchers told children about the invisible and imaginary Princess Alice, who was \u201cpresent\u201d in the room and sitting in a nearby chair. After this, children were left alone and given the opportunity to cheat on a task for a reward. While some children looked towards the empty chair, fewer still waved their hands through Alice\u2019s ostensible location, and there was only very weak statistical evidence that this induction influenced children\u2019s behaviour at all \u2013\u00a0other authors, including myself, have failed to replicate this effect.<\/span><\/p>\nIn contrast, there is the\u00a0\u201cCandy Witch\u201d study. Here, two different adults visited a school on two separate occasions, told children about the Candy Witch and showed the children pictures of her. They were told the Candy Witch would trade some of their Halloween candy for a toy (if they could refrain from eating it \u2013\u00a0no small task for a child). Parents also needed to phone the Candy Witch in advance. As a result, many children believed in the Candy Witch, some even a year later.<\/span><\/p>\nThe primary difference between these two studies is the amount of effort (many) adults put in to compel the children. Children are quite sensitive to effort, and with good reason.<\/span><\/p>\nActions speak louder than words<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nChildhood is a unique, evolved life-stage in which sexual maturation is delayed in favour of brain growth and social learning. Historically, the only way to learn about something you haven\u2019t directly experienced was to rely\u00a0on testimony. Children can differentiate between\u00a0fantasy and history, evaluate the\u00a0strength of evidence\u00a0and prefer claims with\u00a0scientific framing. Children\u00a0in many cultures\u00a0are less likely than adults to appeal to supernatural explanations\u00a0for unlikely events. In fact, children\u00a0learn<\/em>\u00a0to make supernatural claims.<\/span><\/p>\nTheory suggests that rituals may be a particularly influential kind of testimony. Joe Henrich\u2019s theory of\u00a0credibility enhancing displays\u00a0suggests that learners (such as children), to avoid exploitation, should pay attention to the actions of models (such as adults), and attempt to determine the degree to which a model believes something based on how costly their actions would be if those beliefs weren\u2019t sincerely held. Put simply: actions speak louder than words.<\/span><\/p>\nThe \u201cSanta Claus\u201d parts of Christmas are an excellent demonstration of adults willfully participating in a prolonged, high-cost cultural ritual. Santa must be real, otherwise why would my parents do this? The trick, of course, is that we tell children, over and over, that the tree, the Christmas lists, the cookies and the glasses of milk are for Santa and not that they are for tradition.<\/span><\/p>\nGenerating belief is hard<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nBecause Christmas saturates our culture, it is taken for granted. And because Santa is a lie we tell to children, we don\u2019t treat it as a mature topic. Yet both Christmas and Santa have a lot to teach us about ourselves and how we come to understand reality.<\/span><\/p>\nSanta, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are somewhat unique. They require participation in social norms and cultural rituals in a way no other supernatural figures do (exempting religious figures). Children are not so much confused about what is a real, but sensitive to a diversity of cues we adults provide.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd when it comes to Santa Claus, we tend to not only make a claim, but we engage in many detailed actions, which would seem too costly to engage in if we were lying. My own preliminary\u00a0research\u00a0has shown that the figures most commonly associated with rituals are the figures that are most endorsed as real \u2013 more real, even, than some other likely figures like aliens and dinosaurs.<\/span><\/p>\nChildren are sensitive to our actions \u2013 singing carols, erecting dead trees inside our homes, leaving out milk and cookies \u2013 and children, sensibly, attend to this. And the result is belief: mum and dad wouldn\u2019t do this if they didn\u2019t believe, so Santa must be real.<\/span><\/p>\nWhy would they lie to me?<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Rohan-Kapitany.jpg?resize=66%2C66&ssl=1\")
Rohan Kapitany<\/span><\/strong>
\n<\/span>Lecturer in Psychology, <\/span>
\nKeele University<\/span><\/p>\n
\n* Published in print edition on 13 December 2019<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Santa myth tells us more about adults than children<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":24005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8348],"tags":[21138,3338,21140,21141,21142,21139,13156,1628],"class_list":["post-24002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-conversation","tag-beliefs","tag-christmas","tag-easter-bunny","tag-father-christmas","tag-myth","tag-mythology","tag-psychology","tag-santa-claus"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Santa.jpg?fit=1024%2C543&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-6f8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Santa.jpg?resize=640%2C339&ssl=1\")
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