Constructing Ideas of the Supernatural

ABSTRACT

The recent proliferation of research on children’s supernatural concepts is noteworthy, as this work is necessary for a full account of human cognition. Despite this advancement in our field, there is a lingering tendency for scholars to exotify supernatural concepts; to treat them as distinct or special. Arguments have been raised that these concepts are “prepared” to develop, even inherent; other arguments dismiss these ideas as “immature” or “childish.” Yet, the empirical record documents that supernatural concepts are no more inherent and no more childish than “natural” concepts. Just like concepts of nature, supernatural concepts are constructed upon and constrained by one’s existing conceptual architecture. I illustrate these points by drawing upon work on children’s understanding of supernatural minds, like the minds of “omniscient” deities. This work reveals that young children have great difficulty in understanding such purported minds, but through a protracted developmental process children and adults may gradually approach an understanding of all-knowingness. Based on these and other data, I argue that constructivism makes possible some supernatural ideas that are typically not realized until late childhood or adulthood, contradicting both the view that supernatural concepts are inherent and the view that such concepts are “childish”. As well, I emphasize that understanding how children develop beliefs in supernatural concepts requires understanding how they construct mental representations of those concepts. Embracing the fact that supernatural concepts develop through the same processes as concepts of nature will help to further bring research on these critical topics into the mainstream.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ Methodological limitations (e.g., the use of wide age bins and small sample sizes) that are common to studies that have failed to identify this pattern are discussed in detail elsewhere (e.g., Lane et al., 2010).

² Of note, some scholars have contended that 3-year-olds’ tendency to fail these false-belief tasks (to report that agents hold beliefs that are consistent with reality) is evidence that they are “prepared” to understand all-knowingness (e.g., Barrett et al., 2001). However, studies that have gone further and probed children’s reasoning (e.g., by asking children “How would God/mom know what is inside the box?”) reveal that 3-year-olds rarely mention agents’ special minds or expansive knowledge to justify their responses – rather, they often refer to their own knowledge (“because I know what’s inside”) or to reality (“that’s what’s in there”) (e.g., Kiessling & Perner, 2014; Lane et al., 2010, 2012). Children’s (and adults’) mental inferences may be biased by reality or by their own knowledge (Birch, 2005), but their mental inferences are not omniscience-biased. Later, I expand on how children’s reasoning and explanations are critical in revealing what children really think about the “supernatural” world.