Is What Mickey Mouse Says Impossible? Informant Reality Status and Children’s Beliefs in Extraordinary Events

ABSTRACT

As children get older, they become better able to discriminate between impossible and improbable statements and they realize that improbable events can occur in reality while impossible ones cannot. However, when children hear about extraordinary events from fictional entities (e.g., popular characters from children’s media), they may be more likely to doubt that the events can occur in reality. The current studies examine how an informant’s reality status and familiarity influence children’s belief in statements about improbable and impossible events. Across two studies, children ages 4, 6, and 8 (N = 362) heard impossible and improbable statements from an unfamiliar person, a familiar character, or an unfamiliar character (Study 1) or a real or pretend person (Study 2) and judged whether each statement could happen in reality. As in previous studies, older children were more likely than younger children to believe improbable events could occur. Additionally, for both types of statements, children’s judgments about the possibility of the events were similar regardless of the informant. These results suggest that when children hear extraordinary statements described by fictional characters, they pay more attention to the content of the statement than to the source.

Acknowledgement

We thank the undergraduate researchers of the University of Louisville Knowledge in Development Lab for their assistance, as well as NicholausNoles, Megan Norris, Lauren Girouard, Kriss-Ann Gayle, and Khushboo Patel for their helpful feedback. Also, we would like to thank the staff, parents, and students at participating schools for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/e9vbu and https://osf.io/9324h.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Preregistered. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/e9vbu and https://osf.io/9324h.