Mick Hartley

Psychologists continue to probe the depths of the human mind with their incisive experiments. This is from a CiF piece by Ben Rogers, though the experiment was reported last year:

Studies by Professor Jacqueline Woolley and colleagues at the Children’s Research Laboratory at the University of Texas found that…children use pretty much the same cues as adults to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Adults tend to rely on “context” to decide when we should take a claim about something seriously and when we should not. When a man wearing a sandwich board announces that “the end is nigh” we tend to ignore him. But when a large body of professionally accredited scientists tell us that the climate is warming, we believe them.

To see if children could also use context in this way, Woolley told two groups of children about “surnits” and other made-up entities. Surnits were introduced to the first group, in a fantastical context: “Ghosts try to catch surnits when they fly around at night.” They were characterised to the second group in scientific terms: “Doctors use surnits to help them in the hospital.”

The four to six-year-olds who heard the medical description were much more likely to think surnits were real than children who were told they had something to do with ghosts. “The children demonstrated that they do not indiscriminately believe everything they’re told, but use some pretty high-level tools to distinguish between fantasy and reality,” Woolley writes.

In a related experiment, psychologists urged children to jump from the top of a ten-storey apartment block, telling them not to worry, it was a magic building and they’d be caught by fairies. Only 6% of the children subsequently plunged to their deaths. When the experiment was repeated with journalists, the figure rose to 54%.