Dr. Karen Zoufal | 12/24/2020
Young children understand that dinosaurs are real, but fictional characters like Peter Pan and Spongebob don’t. When it comes to characters like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, on the other hand, younger children are a bit ambivalent, as scientists report in the magazine “PLOS”.
–
Even children from three years of age can understand the difference between “real” and “not real”. For the current study, the researchers asked 176 children between the ages of two and eleven how real they thought thirteen different figures were. For this, they should distribute them on a scale from zero (in no case real) to eight (very real) points. The majority of the children divided the characters into four groups. With seven out of eight points, Dinosaurier and the “Wiggles”, an Australian band that makes music for children, were rated the most “real” ones. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy scored six points on the “authenticity scale”, followed by ambiguous characters such as aliens, dragons and ghosts (four points) and fictional characters such as Peter Pan, SpongeBob and Elsa (four points). Adults and children seven and over tended to divide the characters into only three groups: real, non-real, and ambiguous, such as B. Spirits and extraterrestrials.
Every second child wants to see Santa Claus
“We show that children tend to have a differentiated understanding of reality – more than many expect,” write the scientists. They suspect that rituals play a particularly strong role in whether children classify people like Santa Claus as real “Evidence,” such as providing Santa Claus with milk and biscuits that disappeared the next morning, cemented this belief, and about 40 percent of children said they had seen Santa Claus in real life.
What: DOI: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0234142
– .
