Beliefs about Unobservable Scientific and Religious Entities are Transmitted via Subtle Linguistic Cues in Parental Testimony

ABSTRACT

We explored the role of parental testimony in children’s developing beliefs about the ontological status of typically unobservable phenomena. US parents and their 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 25 dyads) separately rated their confidence in the existence of scientific and religious unobservable entities (e.g., germs, angels), and were invited to engage in an unmoderated dyadic conversation about the entities. Both parents and children were more confident in the existence of the scientific entities compared to the religious entities. Parental religiosity predicted the strength of their belief in the religious entities, and these beliefs were positively associated with their children’s judgments in the domain of religion. We coded parental testimony produced during the unmoderated conversation for a number of subtle linguistic cues that convey their confidence and prevailing beliefs in an entity’s existence. The results revealed consistent cross-domain differences: parents expressed more uncertainty, were more likely to mention variation in people’s beliefs and make explicit claims about the ontological status of the religious, as compared to the scientific entities. However, with increasing religiosity, parents produced fewer cues to uncertainty, mentioned belief variation less often, and were more likely to make claims of endorsement when talking about the religious unobservables. Importantly, the pattern of coded linguistic cues in parental testimony was significantly associated with children’s ontological judgments. The present findings have implications for understanding the socio-cultural mechanisms by which confidence in the existence of invisible agents and processes develops in childhood.

Acknowledgments

We thank the families and schools who participated in this research. We also thank Jennifer M. Clegg, Yixin Kelly Cui, Telli Davoodi, Kathryn Leech, Ayse Payir and Wani Qiu for their help with collecting and coding the data and Paul L. Harris for valuable comments on earlier drafts. This research was supported by a Large Grant #59820 from the John Templeton Foundation awarded to KHC.

Disclosure statement

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://osf.io/a7mrk/?view_only=187f0c9a3a8748c1b604c8e7f3bd1282

Data availability statement

Data for Study 1 are available here: https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zhw7-8r98. Data for Study 2 are available here: https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-arb7-9z72.

open-scholarship open-data

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZD3B9.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ We used a perceived socioeconomic measure taken from a larger survey designed to explore the transmission of beliefs in the domain of science and religion across diverse cultures. We decided to include a subjective measure to control for cultural differences in average family income and/or other objective socioeconomic status indicators because we planned to run cross-cultural comparisons of the sample demographics.

² All of the main and interaction effects reported in the analyses hold when we do not include the scoring of this question in the religiosity index.

³ One family participated in this phase at home and received identical written instructions. The only difference in the protocol for home participation was that parents, rather than the experimenter, had to operate the audio recorder provided to them.

⁴ Despite high agreement (92%) for the coding of reality status statements in the domain of science, the reliability test produced a lower kappa statistic score than expected (κ = .72). This result is likely explained by an imbalance in the coding distribution. Specifically, a substantial number of agreed upon cases fell under one modality (i.e., parents did not mention the reality status of the scientific entities).

⁵ As noted in the “Preliminary Analyses” subsection, the model for parents’ use of uncertainty cues included the control variable of time spent (entered in seconds; continuous variable) discussing an entity.

⁶ The rationale for this decision was to allow us to appropriately equate the explicit existence statements for the religious entities with those for the scientific entities (e.g., “God is real”, “Germs are real”) in our final models that explored the broader effects of such claims on children’s ontological judgments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [59820].