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Transcript:
VERY IMPORTANT CONTENT WARNING: this video is NOT for children. I mean, none of my videos are for children for a variety of reasons like how I curse like a sailor but this video is absolutely not for children for realsies. If you are a child, please stop this video and go watch YouTube videos that ARE for children, like those weirdly sexual Elsa and Spider-man videos. Remember those? What the fuck were they about, anyway? Creepy shit. Anyway, great, the kids are gone, let’s talk about how it’s okay to lie to kids about Santa Claus.
I’ve literally made a video about this every five years or so and I refuse to stop because, as a person with no children, I have a very strong opinion about how other people should raise THEIR children. It’s the perfect crime, because there is no evidence that my methods would actually royally fuck up a kid.
Anyway, there’s a new study that once again validates my extremely correct opinion, so it’s time to make this video again.
First, I’ll tell you about the study that initially got me interested in this topic: the Candy Witch. Way back in 2004, psychologist Jacqueline Woolley (who is now Director of the Children’s Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin), led a study in which she told a bunch of little kids about a magical being who would visit their rooms the night after Halloween. She told them that if they left a piece of candy under their pillow, the Candy Witch would replace it with a little toy.
For half the kids, that was it. For the other half, she recruited their parents to actually pretend to be the Candy Witch and swap the candy and toy. Afterward, she asked all the kids whether or not they believed in the Candy Witch.
The younger kids who were around 3 years old tended to either believe or disbelieve in the Candy Witch regardless of whether or not their parents played along. But older kids, around 5 years old, tended to ONLY believe in the Candy Witch if their parents played along, and those kids believed in her much more strongly than the younger kids.
My takeaway at the time was that around the age of five, kids start actively looking for evidence to understand whether or not something is true. The younger kids didn’t look for evidence, but the older kids did, and when they found evidence that the Candy Witch was real, they believed in her.
The same is true of Santa Claus: kids don’t believe in him because they’re gullible. It’s exactly the opposite: kids believe in Santa Claus because they are skeptical, and they go out looking for evidence, and they find that evidence! They hear the stories, watch the movies, sing the songs, write their letters, get their presents, and even sit in the guy’s lap. Why wouldn’t they believe in him?
This convinced me that teaching kids the Santa myth actually helps them develop their critical thinking skills, and eventually teaches them an extremely important lesson: you need to be skeptical even of authority figures and people you trust because they will lie to you. Hell, they’ll set up an entire fake reality to convince you of the lie.
In researching for this video, I decided to check in and see what Woolley has been up to in the twenty years since the Candy Witch, and I was delighted to find this paper from 2013, which offers a comprehensive overview of the study of children as young skeptics. And I learned quite a bit from it, including a possible correction to what I got out of the Candy Witch study: I came away from that understanding that because the younger kids weren’t swayed by actual evidence, we all must start off life perfectly credulous, believing whatever we’re told, and then slowly start developing critical thinking skills as we age until we perfect those skills as adults.
That’s a hypothesis that’s been proposed by many psychologists in the past, and it’s even been proposed by Richard Dawkins as an adaptive trait that we evolved: babies simply could not learn as quickly as they do if they’re skeptical of everything their caretakers say.
But Woolley challenges this thinking with an overview of research that has demonstrated the opposite, starting with one of the earliest studies on magical thinking by Margaret Mead. In the 1930s, Mead visited the island of Manus in Papua New Guinea, where she found that the population of adults had strong beliefs in ghosts, spirits, and magical charms. To her surprise, though, the same island’s children were extremely skeptical of all those things, and when she introduced a new magical charm to the population (in the form of a wind chime), the adults immediately accepted it and started inventing stories about its powers while the children straight up ignored it.
Woolley goes on to detail research showing that young children frequently decide real things are not real, demonstrating that they don’t just default to credulity. She cites her own study from 2011, in which she hypothesized that children would not believe obviously fantastical stories UNLESS God was involved. For instance, if you tell kids that you split the Atlantic Ocean in two so you could drive from Boston to England they wouldn’t believe it, but if you told them God helped Moses part the Red Sea, they’d believe that because parents and religious authorities assured them God was real. She found that to be true, but ONLY for older kids at the age of 6. Younger kids at the age of 4 were more skeptical, disbelieving the stories whether God was involved or not.
So it seems that there’s good evidence that kids aren’t just little credulous knowledge sponges, and as we age, we actually start placing more trust in authority figures and culture as a whole. When those authority figures offer support for a belief, older kids are more likely than younger kids to then believe it. When they are exposed to a belief as a cultural touchstone, older kids are more likely than younger kids to believe it.
So, while it’s true that the Candy Witch and other studies suggest that it’s around 4 or 5 years old that we start becoming more skeptical by actively looking for evidence to distinguish fantasy from reality, we also may become a bit more credulous by using some shortcuts, like placing more trust in culture and authority, as well as looking for context clues (older kids are more likely to believe something is true if it’s placed in a scientific setting, for instance), and even factoring in our emotions, as studies have shown children are more likely to be skeptical of things that make them angry or scared. And that’s how you may end up with adults who believe the earth is flat when any fucking four-year old could tell you it’s not.
Anyway, on to the most recent study I actually wanted to talk about before getting completely sucked into two decades of research on children’s metacognition: back in October, psychologists at UC Berkeley published this paper in Nature Human Behavior: Exposure to detectable inaccuracies makes children more diligent fact-checkers of novel claims. Aha, that’s right, I was talking about how correct I am that parents should lie to their children about Santa Claus! Back on track.
The researchers gathered 122 children between the ages of 4 and 7 and tested their skeptical abilities by first showing them an e-book with pictures of animals next to true or false statements, like a picture of a zebra and a message that either said “zebras have black and white stripes” or “zebras have green and red stripes.” The kids were then asked if the statement was true or false. It’s unclear if any children were told that an embarrassed zebra is black and white and red all over.
Then they saw similar animals and true or false statements laid out like an online search engine.
Finally, the children were presented with an image showing 20 weird little alien guys called Zorpies. One Zorpie clearly had three eyes, but the others were all wearing sunglasses. The children were asked if it was true or false that all Zorpies have three eyes, but before answering they were allowed to click as many Zorpies as they wanted to remove their sunglasses and see how many eyes they had.
The researchers found that the kids who were exposed to more misinformation were more likely to click more Zorpies to be sure that the answer was true, compared to kids who saw mostly reliable animal facts in the earlier studies. They learned to distrust that online environment, and they correctly deduced that they would have to work harder to fact check it.
The authors conclude “that sanitizing children’s informational environments may inadvertently dampen their natural scepticism. Instead, these findings support the counterintuitive possibility that exposing children to some nonsense may scaffold vigilance towards more subtle misinformation in the future.”
Boom! There you have it! I am once again proven to be the queen of parenting techniques. Lying to children is not just funny, but beneficial for honing their critical thinking skills. You’re welcome, parents. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to tell Indy he can’t go on a hike today. Oh god I’m just kidding I would never lie to my dog. Can you imagine? I’m not a monster.
