Thinking about fantasy: Are children fundamentally different thinkers and believers from
adults?
Jacqueline D. Woolley
My talk today will address children’s ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. This
focus on children’s fantasy-reality differentiation is part of the much larger question of
how and why we believe what we believe about the world. This encompasses a wide
range of questions including, but not limited to, how do we gather information about the
world, who and what do we believe, what kinds of explanations do we use to understand
the world?
In our culture, the ability to differentiate fantasy from reality is often considered the
hallmark of mature reasoning -- adults often pride ourselves on our “rationality” and we
distinguish ourselves from children in terms of it.
So, the ability to make this distinction is central to human cognition. But there are also
important practical implications of knowing when children can make this distinction. To
name one, children’s ability to differentiate reality from fantasy is critical to their ability
to provide valid and accurate testimony in the courtroom.
As you may know, the traditional claim is that children do not distinguish fantasy and
reality. We encounter this view both in the media and in scientific literature. An article in
Sesame Street Parents magazine, for example, addresses the effects of television on
children. The author states that with regard to television violence “Children under 7 are
most at risk because they have trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy.”
(Feb.1999, p.40)
SLIDE: PARENTS MAG & ASTINGTON QUOTE
This perception is not limited to the media, however.
In an academic text on children’s theories of mind, Janet Astington acknowledges
children's good performance on tasks assessing their understanding of reality yet still
maintains that "the boundary between reality and fantasy may still not be clearly drawn"
and "reality and imagination are not always kept strictly apart in the child's world" (1993,
p. 63).
Also supporting this perception are a variety of findings and observations including the
following:
SLIDE : FANTASY BEHAVIORS
a. high incidence of pretend play in children between the ages of 3 and 8. Most
children begin pretending toward the end of their second year of life. The amount of time
children spend in pretend play peaks during the preschool years, and according to most
accounts decreases in frequency between the ages of 5 and 8.
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b. the highest level of belief in imaginary companions in this same age range
c. beliefs in Santa, Easter bunny, etc.
d. beliefs in magic
What I’ll do today is examine these and other related phenomena more closely, and
critically, not just in children but in their adult counterparts, to see exactly how different
children really are from adults. My observation is that children’s fantasy/reality
differentiation has been looked at in almost complete isolation from that of adults. I think
this has led to an improper characterization of children. So, although my primary question
concerns children I will attempt to address what I consider relevant adult evidence as I go
along.
But before proceeding I need to make one distinction.
There are two ways in which children are thought to live in a fantasy world.
SLIDE: THINKING FANTASTICALLY VS. THINKING ABOUT FANTASY
First, they purportedly reason about the world in ways that violate basic physical and
biological (and maybe even mental) principles. That is, they “think fantastically” about
certain things. Fantastical thinking or magical thinking (I will use the terms
synonymously) involves reasoning without knowledge of, or on the basis of some sort of
misconception about, causality, or about natural laws more generally. An example of this
might be a child thinking she could fly.
Second, children believe that various fantastical entities are real, and importantly, may
differ from adults in doing so. I will address both of these in turn.
Here’s a general outline of what I’ll be discussing.
SLIDE: OUTLINE OF TALK
I. Do children “think fantastically”, but more importantly... “Do they differ from adults in
doing so?”
Magical or fantastical thinking can involve violation of physical laws, biological
principles, or even what might be considered mental laws. In my work I have addressed
children’s fantastical thinking in both the mental and physical domains.
I’ll first discuss first my work in the mental domain.
SLIDE: IMAGINATION AND REALITY
I. Imagination studies
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Here I’ve focused on the question of children’s ability to distinguish imagination and
reality, specifically their beliefs about whether imagination can be used to create reality.
This is one of the classic areas in which Piaget and others claim children are confused -about the distinction between things they imagine and things that really exist or really
have happened.
To address this, I showed 3- and 4-year-olds an empty box. After establishing that the
children understood that the box was empty I encouraged them to use their imagination
and to imagine something inside. Then children were simply asked whether the box
contained the object or was empty. Strikingly I found that about half of the 3-year-old
children, after imagining an object inside an empty box, claimed that the object was
inside. Paul Harris and his colleagues report similar claims from slightly older children.
They asked 4- to 6-year-olds to pretend that a monster or a bunny was inside an empty
box, and then left the room. When left alone in the room with the boxes, children often
peaked inside the "bunny" box and acted afraid of the "monster" box. So it seemed from
this research that children between the ages of 3 and 6 do exhibit fantastical thinking
concerning imagination-reality relations.
But subsequent thinking made me wonder -- were children truly confused here? Or was it
instead a case of Pascal’s wager – sort of a cost-benefit analysis - there wasn’t much harm
in acting as if the object was in the box, and in some cases there was a potential benefit.
So I needed to devise a situation in which there was potential cost to the children of
thinking fantastically, and then see to what extent they would do so.
So I set up a situation involving a behavioral measure that assessed what we called
"practical reasoning."
SLIDE: METHODS
Children were shown 4 boxes. In the first was a real object. In the third box children
imagined an object of the same type found in the first box. After children had imagined
an object inside the box, the experiment was interrupted by an unfamiliar person. This
person requested the object that the child had imagined in the box, and couched her
request in terms of a real-world need (e.g., after the child had imagined a pencil in the
box the unfamiliar experimenter knocked on the door and said, "Excuse me. I'm sorry to
bother you, but I'm working at my desk, and I can't find my pencil. Do you have a pencil
that I could borrow?"). Our measure was which box or boxes the child chose to hand the
E.
SLIDE: RESULTS
With this set-up we found that, most children chose to give the E the box containing the
real object. Almost all children indicated that there were no more boxes that would be
helpful. In a second study, in which there was no real object in the first box, again most
children responded that there was no available object. Across both studies, very few
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children ever chose to hand the experimenter the box in which they had imagined the
object.
I interpret these findings partly in terms of a cost-benefit model. I think that,
although children may often entertain fantastical beliefs when there is little cost of
doing so, or when there is adult encouragement of such beliefs, in other situations
they are fully able to reason rationally about imagination-reality relations. So, it
seems that children engage in fantastical thinking selectively, in some situations but
not others.
Whereas it’s possible that children everywhere could arrive at certain universal
misconceptions about the mind’s effects on reality, we also actively encourage such
beliefs in our culture. How many of us grew up pulling apart the wish-bone of the
Thanksgiving turkey? How many closed our eyes and made a wish while blowing
out our birthday candles? But did we really believe it would work? DO kids really
believe in this kind of thing? Wishing is a primary example of a violation of the
causal principles that govern mind-reality relations. Given that young children
appear to have a pretty solid understanding of basic mind-reality relations, it would
be odd for them to believe in something like wishing.
Which it seems they do…
SLIDE: WISHING CONVERSATION
But there’s been surprisingly little empirical research on this question. So I began by
giving 3- to 6-year-old children a structured interview that assessed their beliefs about
wishing.
SLIDE: INTERVIEW RESULTS
The interview revealed considerable familiarity with wishing in both age groups we
studied, but significantly greater familiarity in the older group. More older than younger
children also claimed to have made a wish themselves. The results also showed that older
children were somewhat more skeptical about the efficacy of wishing. In particular,
significant more younger than older children predicted that an object they wished for
would appear in a box. So it seems that, although many preschool children do believe in
wishing, beliefs about its efficacy decline significantly during these early years.
So now I’ll turn briefly to the question of whether children also think magically in
other areas, specifically whether they reason fantastically about interactions
between physical objects. Magic shows are popular birthday party events for kids
and magicians always draw a good audience of children. But to what extent do
children wholeheartedly endorse magic as a real force that operates in the real
world?
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To investigate this, Katrina Phelps and I presented 4- to 8-year-old children with a series
of unusual physical events. For some of these, we expected children to have explanations,
and for others, we expected that they wouldn’t. For example, we showed children a glass
bottle containing some blue liquid which rose to the top of the container when held in
one’s hand. We were interested in whether children would explain these unusual events
in terms of magic. The prediction, based on the traditional view of children as
fantastical thinkers, was that magical explanations would be high in the youngest
group and decrease with age.
SLIDE: MAGIC RESULTS
We did find that the tendency to appeal to magic decreased with age. However, the
critical determinant of whether children said that magic was involved was whether or not
children had a physical explanation for the events. So age is not necessarily the critical
factor in children's tendency to use magic to explain events; instead it is children's
physical knowledge about an event that is critical in predicting whether magic will be
afforded an explanatory role. So it appears that children’s use of magical explanations
is selective, and does not constitute a general way of thinking about the world.
So, in summary, young children often do appeal to magical forces to explain and predict
events in the real world; in other words, they do engage in what appears to be “fantastical
thinking.” But, for the most part, this tendency does not appear to result from a global
confusion between fantasy and reality. If a general confusion about the fantasy-reality
distinction was at the root of children's magical thinking, it would be unlikely that we
would observe the selective uses of magical thinking found in these studies.
WHAT ABOUT ADULTS?
What about adults? One might extrapolate from this table that adults might exhibit
magical thinking very rarely if ever. But what if we were to come up with events that
even adults find perplexing, or for which they lack a good explanation?
In fact, there is ample evidence that adults engage in fantastical thinking about certain
things and in certain situations. A number of different situations have been shown to lead
to "magical thinking" in adults.
SLIDE: SITUATIONS
1. When adults are faced with a threat which arouses anxiety, they often exhibit magical
thinking (see also e.g., Keinan, 1994). You see a lot of this around exam time.
2. Adults have been shown to have a tendency toward magical thinking in situations
where perception of control is lacking (Langer, 1975).
3. games of chance (Weisz, 1981)
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4. illness (Taylor, 1983; Taylor, Lichtman, & Wood, 1984)
5. stress (Keinan, 1994),
6. death (Persinger & Makarec, 1990)
(I can’t take the time to review this literature for you but I’d be happy to discuss it
afterwards.)
Even aside from these special situations, many adults exhibit a wide variety of magical
beliefs -- what we commonly refer to as superstitions.
7. superstition
I’ve collected some statistics from a variety of sources.
SLIDE: SUPERSITIONS (AND CHILDREN’S BELIEFS)
As you can see, the percentage of adults in the US who espouse a variety of superstitious
beliefs is quite high. And I haven’t even begun to consider the number of people
believing in various forms of parapsychology -- mental telepathy, telekinesis,
clairvouyance, etc.
The point I want to make here is that these numbers are not very different from those
numbers I reported in the studies of children. For example, in my earlier imagination
work I found that 42% consistently claimed that imagination could create reality. In my
later work I found that between 23 and 38% indicated verbally that imagination could
create reality. In Harris’s studies, 50% of 4-year-olds and 42% of 6-year-olds touched or
opened the “monster” box. Johnson & Harris, using a similar procedure, categorized 63%
of their 3-year-olds as credulous about imagination-reality relations, along with 68% of
their 5-year-olds.
Summing up, results on children’s and adults’ fantastical thinking indicates that, in
certain situations, certain children and certain adults will engage in magical
thinking. In no study do all children engage in such behavior, and in no study do all
adults. How different is the child’s wish for a baby sister from the adult’s avoidance
of walking under a ladder?
Now I’ll turn to the second part of my question: Do children believe in fantastical
entities... Or more precisely, “Do they differ from adults in doing so?”
Possibly the most well-known fantastical character is Santa Claus. This is one wellknown response to a little girl named Virginia’s query about his existence:
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SLIDE: FRANCES CHURCH QUOTE
How does one confirm or disconfirm the existence of something which is unseeable?
Given that many things children hear about are not things they can experience
visually, how do they decide which ones are real and which ones are not?
SLIDE: GERMS AND MONSTERS
Fantasy beliefs are a pervasive component of childhood. Research shows that young
children believe in a wide range of fantastical beings – from ghosts to the Easter
Bunny (e.g., Clarke, 1995). The prevalence of childhood fantasy beliefs has fostered
claims that children are qualitatively different from adults. Specifically the claim is
that they live in a fantasy world and are highly credulous. I refer to this as the
‘credulity view.’
SLIDE: GILBERT & DAWKINS
Such claims have been made not only by developmental psychologists, but by social
psychologists and even prominent physicists.
Yet these claims are mostly made by people who don’t study children. And perhaps
because the view of children as entirely credulous is so deeply entrenched in our
cultural view, there have been very few attempts to assess whether it indeed is true,
and if not, what factors might guide children’s decisions about what’s real and
what’s not. I’ll tell you about some research that addresses this issue. Both sets of
studies involve children’s judgments about the reality status of novel entities.
In one set of studies, I address the effects of the context in which new information is
acquired. Certainly adults are affected by context: Consider a report of the discovery of a
new kind of fish, called a surnit.
SLIDE: FISH
We’re more likely to believe that such a fish really exists if we read about it in National
Geographic than if we read about it in the National Enquirer. But what about children?
Certainly if indeed children are uniformly credulous this question is moot; they would
simply believe in the existence of the fish, or whatever entity they encounter, regardless
of context. But if the credulity view is flawed then perhaps context might matter. Or
perhaps the ability to utilize context in making these sorts of decisions might develop.
SLIDE: CONTEXT STUDY
In the first study, preschool-age children were randomly assigned to either scientific
fantastical, or everyday context conditions. All children were asked to judge the reality
status of three novel entities. We manipulated context in two ways. First, children were
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read either a scientific, fantastical, or an everyday storybook before being given the focal
task. The idea here was that by reading these stories we might either prime certain
categories or increase the availability of certain outcomes according to condition. Second,
the information given about the novel entities varied according to condition.
Children heard essentially the same definitions for each novel entity, except that children
in the scientific context condition heard the entity described with reference to scientists,
children in the fantastical context condition heard the entity described with reference to
dragons, and children in the everyday context condition simply head the entity described
with reference to children.
SLIDE: SURNIT
Since we had no sense of whether children would be sensitive to context at all, we
decided to hit them over the head with it on the first pass. So all children received both
manipulations.
After hearing the story and being introduced to the various entities children were asked,
for each entity, to say whether it was real or pretend.
SLIDE: RSJ
The results showed that the 3-year-olds’ scores were not affected by the context
manipulation but the scores of the older two age groups were. Four-year-olds in the
scientific condition judged significantly more of the novel entities as real than did 4-yearolds in the fantastical condition. Five-year-olds in both the scientific and everyday
conditions judged more novel entities as real than did 5-year-olds in the fantastical
condition.
In a second study, we addressed which context manipulation was driving the effect. So,
we assigned children to one of 4 conditions: scientific story, fantastical story, scientific
description, or fantastical description. Each child judged 5 novel entities. As you can see
here, the effect of context on children’s judgments was due to the descriptions they were
provided and not to the type of story they heard before the task. We found a similar
pattern in a version of the study adapted for adults.
SLIDE: STUDY 2
One thing we were curious about was why there was no context effect in the 3-year-olds.
We know from previous work that not all 3-year-olds are clear on whether various
fantastical entities are real or pretend. It occurred to us that, if some of the 3-year-olds did
not view the fantastical context condition as fantastical, then it wouldn’t have the desired
effect on them. In other words, if you think ghosts are real, then the fantastical context is
no different from the realistic context. To see whether this might be going on, we divided
children into passers and failers. Passers were those children who correctly stated the
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reality status of the majority of the entities used in the tasks, and failers were those who
did not.
SLIDE: PASSERS VS. FAILERS
As you can see, among the passers there is an effect of context whereas among the failers
there is not. Even among the 3-year-olds, if we just look at passers, the context effect is
significant. This shows that even 3-year-olds are able to use context.
One question that arises is whether introducing children to novel entities in the lab
mirrors what happens when they encounter novel entities in their daily lives.
We’ve begun to address this question. One place children encounter novel entities quite
frequently is in storybooks. I remember reading a story to my 3-year-old daughter -- I
think it was about a girl who flew away on a swan. At a point in the story she interrupted
me and asked, “Mommy, are swans in real life?” Rachel Riskind and I have found that,
when children encounter novel entities in realistic storybooks, they are more likely to
judge them as real than when they encounter novel entities in fantastical storybooks.
We’ve also explored the processes that might operate when children are introduced to a
novel fantastical entity in an even more naturalistic setting – their preschool.
In this study, Beth Boerger, Art Markman, and I introduced children to a novel Halloween
entity – the Candy Witch.
SLIDE: CANDY WITCH STUDY
One difficulty in studying children’s beliefs about fantastical beings is that children
receive messages about these beings from a variety of sources (e.g., books, movies, peers,
and parents). So, it is difficult to isolate the factors that influence the likelihood that
children will believe in fantastical beings. Also, children often have partially or fully
developed fantasy beliefs by the time researchers are able to assess them. So, although
research exists on children’s beliefs about known fantastical beings, we know little about
what factors affect a child’s initial level of belief in a fantastical being.
So, we visited a preschool and told children about the Candy Witch. Briefly, the CW
visits children’s houses on Halloween night, and takes all the candy children either don’t
want or are willing to part with, and leaves the child a new toy in place of the candy. In
order for this to work, however, we had to get the parents on board. This proved
challenging. We sent out about 100 letters, and in the end we got 25 parents to agree to
have the Candy Witch visit their homes. In other words, they performed the candy-toy
exchange for us in their home. 19 parents consented to have their child interviewed even
though they did not perform the exchange, thus providing us with a control group.
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Again, if the credulity view is accurate, we should get uniform belief in the Candy Witch.
What we were hoping was to get a moderate level of belief, so that we could explore
some of the factors that affected level of belief.
Here’s what some of the kids thought.
We did obtain a moderate level of belief in the CW. In fact, mean level of belief in the
Candy Witch was comparable to that for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. So we felt
that we had succeeded in our attempt to create belief in an event-related fantastical being
We also found evidence for a 5 different factors that affect whether children believe and
how strong their beliefs are. I’ll focus on 3 of them.
SLIDE: 5 FACTORS
This graph shows scores that we created by combining reality status judgments and
certainty ratings. First, among children who were visited by the CW (yellow bars), older
children had higher levels of belief than did younger children.
SLIDE: FIGURE SHOWING AGE X PART EFFECT.
This finding would certainly not have been predicted by the credulity view. The older
children who were visited by the CW also had significantly higher levels of belief than
did older children who were not visited. So, both age and participation in the CW ritual
affected belief levels.
In addition to assessing belief in the CW, our tasks included assessment of
children’s beliefs in a range of familiar fantastical entities. We found that children
who believed in more familiar fantastical beings had higher levels of belief in the
Candy Witch, independent of age. Interestingly, we found this same relation a year
later, when we followed up these participants. I think this suggests that children
may have a coherent network of fantasy beliefs. Ansley Tullos, Beth Boerger, and I
have confirmed and extended these findings in a second study including more
children and a greater age range.
So, across both of these sets of studies, it appears that the credulity hypothesis is in
trouble. Children do not unthinkingly accept all novel information as accurate
representations of reality.
But of course you might be thinking: I would never have believed in the Candy Witch! I
don’t believe in Santa Claus. Kids believe in these fantasy figures. They’re silly!
Consider the following figures:
SLIDE: ADULT BELIEFS
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Clearly a number of adults in our culture believe in a variety of supernatural beings.
SLIDE: KIDS’, TEENAGERS’, AND ADULTS’ BELIEFS
And, as you can see here, the developmental trend predicted by the credulity view appears
to be absent.
How different is an adult’s belief in UFOs from a child’s belief in flying reindeer?
One final note on this topic: There’s no denying that very many adults, and children, in
this country believe in God. In fact a recent poll put this figure at approximately 94%
(Harris Organization, 2000). How might belief in God be related to these issues? For
young children who believe in Santa, he is the one who rewards their good behavior and
punishes their misdeeds; he is the one who watches over them all year long; he is the one
who "knows if you've been bad or good." In fact, children often directly link Santa Claus
and God:
This is a quote from the mother of a young child.
TWO SLIDES: GOD QUOTES
Clearly children are trying to sort all of this out. How they do it is an open question.
SLIDE: CONCLUSIONS
So, I began with the old question of whether children fail to differentiate reality and
fantasy. The old answer was yes. I reframed that question to read “Do children and adults
differ in their ability to differentiate fantasy and reality?” The answer to this question
appears to be No. There seem to be equal numbers of children and adults who think
fantastically and who entertain beliefs in entities for which they have limited or no
empirical evidence.
I also want to challenge the view that young children are credulous. I suggest that they
probably are no more credulous than adults. Given that, in my lab, my students and I have
begun to investigate potential developments in children’s ability to evaluate novel
information. It appears that there are developments in children’s use of contextual cues,
and in how children evaluate evidence. It also appears that children may have a network
of fantasy beliefs, which might facilitate the acceptance of new information. We’re
continuing to investigate other potential factors that might be involved in children’s
ability to make these sorts of judgments.
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