Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Most seven-year-olds explain the natural world in terms of purpose. As we saw in the last paragraph, promiscuous teleology may incline the child to view the world as existing for a purpose. That’s why the creationist view of existence is so intuitively appealing. 43Most religions offer a story of origins and purpose, which is why creationism fits so well with what seems natural at seven years of age. Maybe that’s the origin of the Jesuit saying ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.’

Children are also prone to ‘anthropomorphism’, which means that they think about nonhuman things as if they were human. It’s easy to see this happen with pets and dolls, which children are encouraged to treat as human. However, children might also think that a burning chair feels pain or that a bicycle aches after being kicked. They imagine how they would feel if they were burned or kicked and, because of their egocentrism, they misapply this view to everything, including inanimate objects. 44

Even adults easily slip into this way of thinking. Have you ever lost your temper at an object? Usually it’s one that has let you down at a critical moment. The car that dies on the way to an important meeting or, more often in my case, the computer that crashes when you have not backed up your work. Anthropomorphism explains why you talk nicely, beg, and then threaten machines when they act up. It’s just the natural way to interact with objects that seem purposeful. We know that talking to objects has absolutely no effect, but we still do it.

So the origins of supernatural beliefs are within every developing child. All of these ideas are not new. The philosopher David Hume wrote about mind design and supernatural beliefs and identified the same aspects of mind design more than two hundred years ago. Hume recognized the same childlike reasoning in adults when trying to make sense of the world. Adults too see a world of things that seem alive with human qualities.

There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to everything, that hurts or pleases us. Hence . . . trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion. 45

From this perspective, we can see how an egocentric, category-confused child is going to hold beliefs that are the origins of adult supernaturalism. To begin, children have difficulty distinguishing between their own thoughts and those of others. A child who has an idea thinks that others also share the same idea. Such a notion would be consistent with telepathy and other aspects of mind-melding. Also, children may believe they can affect reality by thinking, which is the basis for psychokinesis: the manipulation of physical objects by thought alone. Children report that certain rituals, such as counting to ten, can influence future outcomes, which is equivalent to spells and superstitions. They also believe that certain objects have special powers and energies. This is sympathetic magical thinking that links objects by invisible connections. To top it all, children see life forces everywhere. Anyone holding such misconceptions could easily succumb to a supersense. This is why I think that adult supernaturalism is the residue of childhood misconceptions that have not been truly disposed of.

DO CHILDREN REALLY BELIEVE?

Do children realize that their misconceptions are supernatural? Young children do not use or understand the word ‘supernatural.’ Rather, when faced with something inexplicable, they are more likely to say that it is ‘magic.’ What do they mean by this? The word has lost its sinister connotation and is now used in everyday language. From ‘magic markers’ to ‘Magic Johnson’, the term is synonymous with anything special. In recent years, developmental psychologists have begun to question whether children really do believe in magic. After all, they don’t try to conjure up cookies when they are hungry, and they know their imaginary friends are just make-believe. In one study, pre-school children were asked to imagine that an empty box contained a pencil. 46They could do this easily, but they did not actually believe that there was a pencil inside. When another adult entered the room asking to borrow a pencil, the children did not make the mistake of offering them the one that they had imagined in the box.

If adults talk about magic, maybe children are just playing along when asked to imagine magical things. 47After all, what else would we expect them to say if we tell them that we have hired a magician for their magical birthday party who is going to do magic tricks and that all the guests should come dressed as wizards or fairies? Our whole approach to young children is to emphasize magic as part of normal experience. Magic has lost its supernatural meaning.

The Russian psychologist Eugene Subbotsky revealed magical thinking in young children with a simple conjuring trick. He placed a stamp in a box, muttered magical words in his heavily accented Russian, and then opened the box to reveal a stamp cut in half 48Young children believed that it was the same stamp and that the Russian spell had cut it in half. Older nine-year-olds and adults always said that the stamp must have been switched, while younger children were more gullible. But are adults so sure about the world? Although they thought the whole charade was a trick, they were unwilling to put their passport or driver’s licence in Subbotsky’s box. They did not want to risk being wrong.

When the stakes are high, we are less certain of our reason. It would appear that, just like the killer’s cardigan, we consider potential costs and benefits when weighing up the possible unknown. This is why rational students are unhappy to sign a piece of paper selling their soul for real money 49Only one in five would put their signature to the contract, even though the form clearly stated that it was not legally binding. Rationally, we would expect them to have more courage in their conviction, like the atheist Gareth Malham, who sold his soul on eBay in 2002 to help pay off his £10,000 student debt. There again, his soul only went for a paltry £10, which hardly justified the effort.

Is it really so surprising that young children give magical explanations for conjuring tricks? Maybe they just use magic as the default explanation when they can’t figure something out. What we should find more remarkable is that children grow up in a world full of complex technologies and events that they cannot possibly understand and yet do not talk about them as magic. Remote controls operate machines from a distance. People can talk to others via little handheld boxes, and so on. The modern child is immersed in a world that would amaze and possibly frighten someone from before the scientific revolution. As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ 50So why do children not call everything magic?

Young children may start off as Piaget described, with all sorts of magical misconceptions, but with experience older children become more savvy. Children appreciate that there are some things they know and others they do not. When they see something that violates what they expect, they are more suspicious. But it is not the supernatural thinking of young children that is so remarkable, but the supernatural beliefs of adults who should know better. With experience and understanding, supernatural thinking should decline in children, but there is a paradoxical increase in supernatural beliefs in some cultures. In societies where belief in the supernatural is the norm, it increasingly plays an explanatory role in adults’ reasoning. This is the effect of environment, and this is where religion wields its influence. For example, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead asked Samoan villagers to give an explanation for why a canoe might have broken its mooring in the night, children tended to give physical reasons, whereas adults were more likely to talk about hexes and witchcraft. 51That’s because the adults had become increasingly influenced by the context of culture.