I heard that small children get offended by hearing that their favorite teacher was wrong about something. But somehow this effect gets weaker as they grow up.
A part of it may be realising that humans make mistakes, even humans we love and respect. But I suspect another important part may be that as we grow up, the details of beliefs of elementary-school teachers are forgotten, and the high-school teachers don’t have the same impact on us because we meet them older. At some moments people realize their own parents make mistakes, which starts with a big disappointment, and then gradually becomes just an acceptable fact about fellow humans.
So seems to me there are circumstances which make “this is what people I love and respect believe; thinking otherwise would mean betraying them” thinking stronger or weaker. Typical religious education has a few aspects that make it stronger: it starts at a small age, it is reinforced periodically, it is a belief of community instead of just individuals, and it is intentionally connected with strong emotions. There are whole institutions built for this purpose, it doesn’t just happen accidentally. Many kinds of manipulation, lying, and emotional blackmail are considered fair game for this noble purpose. -- I mean, small children are literally scared by prospect of torture unless they agree to think and feel certain way! (Sure, it’s the invisible imaginary person that is supposed to torture them, but the whole point is that the imaginary person and therefore the threat is presented to the child as a sure fact, confirmed by all respected authorities.)
Other beliefs usually don’t have this strong support, although in some situations a political belief can work the same way. North Korea would be a textbook example, but on a smaller scale it could happen everywhere if you have sufficiently mindkilled parents and neighbors and censored access to information outside of the community. Ordinary beliefs typically don’t have this kind of elaborate repulsive system.
I heard that small children get offended by hearing that their favorite teacher was wrong about something. But somehow this effect gets weaker as they grow up.
A part of it may be realising that humans make mistakes, even humans we love and respect. But I suspect another important part may be that as we grow up, the details of beliefs of elementary-school teachers are forgotten, and the high-school teachers don’t have the same impact on us because we meet them older. At some moments people realize their own parents make mistakes, which starts with a big disappointment, and then gradually becomes just an acceptable fact about fellow humans.
Small children are quite helpless, and in a society more tolerant of harming or abandoning them (eg. the ancestral environment), offending the adults around them carried severe risks. Teenagers and adults could probably better afford to express disagreement.
That meshes well with another study that found that children under 5 assume adults know everything that the child knows. It’s only after around age 5 that children begin to stop ascribing that trait to adults. Link:
Lane concludes: “…data from the current study provide compelling evidence that when children begin to understand the cognitive limitations of humans, they typically attribute those same limitations to God, and this applies even to religiously exposed children.
Only later, at around age 5 years did religiously exposed children reliably differentiate between humans’ fallible mental abilities and inaccurate mental states versus God’s less fallible abilities and states.
These results suggest that in their everyday reasoning, even children who are raised in religious settings often initially understand God’s mind as constrained and fallible, very similar to their understanding of ordinary human minds.”
So children have to develop an understanding of omniscience, even if they are raised in a religious environment. However, when raised in a religious environment, they seem to understand omniscience earlier—evidence of the importance of learning, as well as brain maturation.
I heard that small children get offended by hearing that their favorite teacher was wrong about something. But somehow this effect gets weaker as they grow up.
A part of it may be realising that humans make mistakes, even humans we love and respect. But I suspect another important part may be that as we grow up, the details of beliefs of elementary-school teachers are forgotten, and the high-school teachers don’t have the same impact on us because we meet them older. At some moments people realize their own parents make mistakes, which starts with a big disappointment, and then gradually becomes just an acceptable fact about fellow humans.
So seems to me there are circumstances which make “this is what people I love and respect believe; thinking otherwise would mean betraying them” thinking stronger or weaker. Typical religious education has a few aspects that make it stronger: it starts at a small age, it is reinforced periodically, it is a belief of community instead of just individuals, and it is intentionally connected with strong emotions. There are whole institutions built for this purpose, it doesn’t just happen accidentally. Many kinds of manipulation, lying, and emotional blackmail are considered fair game for this noble purpose. -- I mean, small children are literally scared by prospect of torture unless they agree to think and feel certain way! (Sure, it’s the invisible imaginary person that is supposed to torture them, but the whole point is that the imaginary person and therefore the threat is presented to the child as a sure fact, confirmed by all respected authorities.)
Other beliefs usually don’t have this strong support, although in some situations a political belief can work the same way. North Korea would be a textbook example, but on a smaller scale it could happen everywhere if you have sufficiently mindkilled parents and neighbors and censored access to information outside of the community. Ordinary beliefs typically don’t have this kind of elaborate repulsive system.
Small children are quite helpless, and in a society more tolerant of harming or abandoning them (eg. the ancestral environment), offending the adults around them carried severe risks. Teenagers and adults could probably better afford to express disagreement.
That meshes well with another study that found that children under 5 assume adults know everything that the child knows. It’s only after around age 5 that children begin to stop ascribing that trait to adults. Link:
Is this, basically, the theory of mind?
Wow thank you! Great insights.