About this paper symposium

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Panel information
Panel 20. Social Cognition

Paper #1
The ontogeny of religious affiliation
Author information	Role
Boli Reyes-Jaquez, Ph.D., University of New Hampshire, USA, United States	Presenting author
Kara Weisman, University of California, Riverside, USA	Non-presenting author
Laura Taylor, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland	Non-presenting author
Mahesh Srinivasan, University of California, Berkeley, USA	Non-presenting author
Ageliki Nicolopoulou, Lehigh University, USA	Non-presenting author
Allison Williams-Gant, Boston University, USA	Non-presenting author
Audun Dahl, Cornell University, USA	Non-presenting author
Benjamin Jee, Worcester State University, USA	Non-presenting author
Emily Burdett, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom	Non-presenting author
Florencia Anggoro, College of the Holy Cross, USA	Non-presenting author
Hannah Kramer, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA	Non-presenting author
Irini Skopeliti, University of Patras, Greece	Non-presenting author
Kathleen Corriveau, Boston University, USA	Non-presenting author
Laura Shneidman, USA, Pacific Lutheran University	Non-presenting author
Natassa Kyriakopoulou, Greece, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens	Non-presenting author
Rebekah Richert, USA, University of California, Riverside	Non-presenting author
Yue Yu, Singapore, Nanyang Technological University	Non-presenting author
Gil Diesendruck, Israel, Bar-Ilan University	Non-presenting author
Jocelyn Dautel, United Kingdom, Queen's University Belfast	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Throughout human history, countless cooperative but also hostile acts have been rooted in whether individuals coded others into the categories “us” or “them” (e.g., Brewer, 1999). Religions, with their endorsement of costly rituals and a common belief in supernatural, punitive deities, are a widespread source for identity formation, group cohesion, and parochialism among co-religionists (e.g., Lang et al., 2019; Norenzayan et al., 2016). Given religious affiliation’s prevalence and societal impact, we investigated its developmental roots by modeling across cultures and faiths children’s categorization of themselves and others as religionists. Researchers have documented in contexts like Israel and Ireland, that children are attentive to cues relevant to religious affiliation, including ethno-religious labels and symbols (e.g., Birnbaum et al., 2010; Diesendruck & HaLevi, 2006; Taylor et al., 2020, 2021). As part of the Developing Belief Network collaborative, here we extended prior work by examining across various countries (e.g., United States, Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, South Africa, Uganda, Indonesia, Singapore) and ethno-religious groups (e.g., Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists), the onset of religious affiliation; specifically, we tested children’s categorization of themselves and others as members of their family’s religion. Children (n = 959) from religious families completed two tasks which evaluated their religious categorization of (a) other individuals and (b) themselves. A first task ("Religious Indicators") presented participants with human characters who exhibited characteristics typically associated with their own religious group (e.g., “This kid believes that Jesus died for our sins”), and additional characters who exhibited cultural/neutral characteristics (i.e., that might apply to children within the same context, irrespective of religion, which served as a baseline, e.g., “This kid believes that George Washington was a U.S. president”). This task asked, among other things, if each of the presented characters belonged to the participant's religious group (other-categorization measure). A second task ("Self-identification") asked children if they themselves belonged to one or more culturally relevant religious groups, e.g., “Are you, Christian, Jewish, Muslim…none of these.” (self-identification measure). Figures 1 and 2 show the effect of development on participants’ reasoning. Using Mixed-effects modeling, we found that with age, children increasingly succeeded at the two tasks indicative of religious affiliation reasoning, and regardless of culture or religion. That is, older children were more likely to show religious category awareness by classifying as religiously affiliated a character who exhibited defining characteristics of their religion, versus a character with neutral or cultural characteristics, p < .001; and to self-identify as religious by using the religious label that matched their parent’s report, p < .001. Generally, children succeeded earlier in life at classifying others versus themselves as religious. Affiliating with a religion is a prevalent practice in large-scale societies, with wide-ranging implications for human cooperation and conflict. Here we show that the development of religious affiliation is a protracted process, with awareness of prototypical characteristics indicative of others’ likely religious membership emerging earlier across contexts than children’s own self-awareness or categorization as religious members.

Paper #2
Developing beliefs in religious agents: An analysis of children’s development across cultures, contexts, and religions
Author information	Role
Megan Stutesman, Queen’s University Belfast, United States	Presenting author
Ayse Payir, Union College, USA	Non-presenting author
Hannah J. Kramer, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom	Non-presenting author
John D. Coley, Northeastern University, USA	Non-presenting author
Aidan Feeney, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom	Non-presenting author
Laura K. Taylor, University College Dublin, Ireland	Non-presenting author
Jocelyn Dautel, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Beliefs about unobservable religious agents such as Jesus or Allah develop in early childhood (Nyhof & Johnson, 2017; Payir et al., 2023). Cross-cultural evidence indicates that contextual and cultural factors can influence children’s beliefs about religious agents (Davoodi et al., 2020), but are there overarching, common patterns of development for belief in religious agents during childhood? To explore this question, we assess four- to 11-year-old children’s familiarity with and belief in agents across multiple cultural- and entho-religious contexts. The data presented are a subset of a larger dataset, collected in collaboration with teams across 16 countries with distinct cultural-religious settings. Data collection is ongoing at some sites; therefore, analysis will be updated to include data from additional sites by the conference date. The present analysis includes Catholic and Protestant children in Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (ROI) contexts. Children participated in structured interviews and were asked a series of questions regarding their familiarity with and belief in agents. Religious agents varied across samples and were selected to preserve cultural and religious relevance for each distinct context, designed to maintain a level of standardization across samples. For the present NI (N = 211, Mage = 6.85 years; SDage = 1.83) and ROI (N = 50; Mage = 6.67 years, SDage=1.76) contexts, questions were as follows: (1) Familiarity: Have you heard of [Religious agent (i.e., Jesus/God/the Holy Spirit)]? (2) Belief: Is [Religious agent] real or not real? Familiarity was coded as familiar with the agent (1) or unfamiliar (0), and belief was coded as believing the agent is real (1) or not real (0). Following the belief question, children were also asked how they know the agent is real/not real, for which children’s open-ended responses were qualitatively analysed using inductive thematic analysis. When analysis is updated to include additional sites, qualitative findings will supplement quantitative findings where possible. Results revealed associations between children’s age and familiarity with and belief in religious agents. With age, children demonstrated more familiarity with agents (β = 0.56, SE = 0.07, p < 0.001, OR = 1.74, 95% CI [1.52, 2.02]) and were more likely to believe the agents were real (β = 0.46, SE = 0.07, p < 0.001, OR = 1.57, 95% CI [1.40, 1.81]; see figures 1 and 2 respectively). This developmental pattern is common across ethno-religious groups (i.e., Catholic or Protestant), contexts (i.e., NI or ROI), and agents (i.e., Jesus/ God/the Holy Spirit), however, future research will investigate variation in the onset and gradient of development across these factors. Qualitative analysis indicated that children rely on knowledge transmission from caregivers, religious practices, and cultural customs to inform their beliefs about the reality of agents. Findings suggest a potential universal pattern: that with age, children’s familiarity with and belief in religious agents strengthens. Forthcoming data from additional sites will contribute to a holistic, global understanding of developmental patterns of children’s beliefs in agents across diverse ethnoreligious, geographic, and cultural contexts.

Paper #3
What is “super” about “supernatural” agents? Children’s perceptions of gods across cultural-religious settings
Author information	Role
Kara Weisman, University of California, Riverside, US, United States	Presenting author
Tamer Amin, American University of Beirut, Lebanon	Non-presenting author
Florencia Anggoro, College of the Holy Cross, USA	Non-presenting author
Audun Dahl, Cornell University, USA	Non-presenting author
Gil Diesendruck, Bar-Ilan University, Israel	Non-presenting author
Maliki Ghossainy, Boston University, USA	Non-presenting author
Benjamin D. Jee, Worcester State University, USA	Non-presenting author
Mahesh Srinivasan, University of California, Berkeley, USA	Non-presenting author
Rebekah Richert, University of California, Riverside, USA	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Across most human societies, people come to believe in gods and other beings who violate the basic laws of nature—some by being invisible or intangible, others by being immortal, omniscient, beneficent, or all-powerful. This study examines similarities and differences in perceptions of gods across cultural-religious settings. In this paper, we compare these representations across seven samples from three countries characterized by a high degree of religious diversity (both within and across sites): Christian and Muslim participants in Lebanon (n=151, data collection ongoing); Hindu and Muslim participants in India (n=160); and Christian, Hindu, and Muslim participants in Indonesia (n=173; total N=484). Children between the ages of 4 and 10 years completed a task designed to surface conceptual representations of religious and supernatural agents (see Lesage & Richert, 2021; Richert, Saide, Lesage, & Shaman, 2017; Saide & Richert, 2020; Weisman, Markman, & Dweck, 2017; Weisman, Legare, Smith, Dzokoto, Aulino, Ng, et al., 2021). Children answered 20 two-alternative forced choice questions about the physical, biological, cognitive-epistemic, social-emotional, and sociological constraints on the behavior of 3-4 agents. For example, Indonesian Christian children were asked, “Could a person keep going without ever eating any food, or would a person need to eat food eventually? What about Jesus? What about God?” The current analysis focuses on children’s evaluations of the “Biggest” god (Norenzayan, 2013) in their local setting (e.g., God, Allah, Bhagwan, Sang Hyang Widhi), compared to their evaluations of ordinary humans. In general, children were far more likely to say that a god could violate one of these constraints than they were to say that a person could (log-odds: 3.36, z=5.02, p<0.001, per mixed effects logistic regression with random intercepts by participant nested within country, by item, and by identity of the god). This effect was somewhat larger for items in the biological domain relative to the grand mean (log-odds: 0.77, z=6.81, p<0.001), and somewhat smaller for items in the sociological domain (log-odds: -0.72, z=-8.48, p<0.001), but these domain-wise differences were driven primarily by responses to the human targets rather than children’s representations of gods; see Figure 1. These effects increased across the age range: Older children drew greater distinctions between gods and humans in their reasoning (log-odds: 0.38, z=18.10, p<0.001), particularly in the biological domain (log-odds: 0.13, z=3.11, p=0.002). See Figure 2 for age-related differences collapsing across domains. Preliminary analysis of cultural variability suggests that these general trends vary in degree across cultural-religious settings. For example, Hindu children in India tended to represent the “Biggest God” (Bhagwan) as relatively less likely to violate natural laws than children in other settings; and Indonesian children across all three religious groups tended to distinguish more sharply between gods and humans (Figure 2). These patterns highlight how religious, cultural, and political beliefs shape conceptualizations of the relationship between gods and humans even in the early phases of concept formation.

Paper #4
Children’s application of religious, moral, and conventional norms across cultures
Author information	Role
Dr. Meltem Yucel, Ph.D., Duke, United States	Presenting author
Bolivar Reyes-Jaquez, University of New Hampshire, USA	Non-presenting author
Audun Dahl, Cornell University, USA	Non-presenting author
Mahesh Srinivasan, University of California, Berkeley, USA	Non-presenting author
Gil Diesendruck, Bar-Ilan University, Israel	Non-presenting author
Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College, USA	Non-presenting author
Kara Weisman, University of California, Riverside, USA	Non-presenting author
Shaun Nichols, Cornell University, USA	Non-presenting author
Florencia Anggoro, College of the Holy Cross, USA	Non-presenting author
Jocelyn Dautel, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland	Non-presenting author
Benjamin D. Jee, Worcester State University, USA	Non-presenting author
Abigail McLaughlin, Boston College, USA	Non-presenting author
Ageliki Nicolopoulou, Lehigh University, USA	Non-presenting author
Natassa Kyriakopoulou, Greece, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens	Non-presenting author
Irini Skopeliti, Greece, University of Patras	Non-presenting author
Yue Yu, Singapore, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University	Non-presenting author
Xin (Alice) Zhao, China, East China Normal University	Non-presenting author
Tamar Kushnir, USA, Duke University	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Religion is often associated with social cohesion and prosociality (Kelly et al., 2024; Norenzayan et al., 2014). Notably, religion can also be at the root of intractable and deadly conflicts when people from different faiths disagree over beliefs and practices. Religious conflicts can also arise within members of the same faith who disagree on certain religious practices or norms—norms that are introduced by religious authorities (e.g., gods or their human representatives, sacred texts) whose violation does not directly impact others’ welfare or rights (e.g., eating pork) (Atran & Ginges, 2012; Nucci & Turiel, 1993). But who do children expect their religious norms to apply to? And do these expectations vary across age and/or cultures? We hypothesized that with age, children would apply their religious norms more to the members of their religion, as compared to members of other religions. Indeed, recent research finds that older children and adolescents evaluate religious norms as being group-specific (Dahl et al., 2022; Srinivasan et al., 2019). Although prior research shows that children expect many moral norms (i.e., harm- or injustice-based rules) and social-conventions (i.e., social customs) to apply across religious groups within a society, we also expected that children would treat religious norms differently than moral and conventional norms. We present ongoing work on how 4- to 12-year-old children (N = 1253, Mage = 7.89 years) apply different kinds of norms to same-faith (e.g., a Muslim character) and other-faith protagonists (e.g. a non-Muslim character). Using a within-subjects design, we examined developmental changes in children’s judgments of violations of religious (e.g., “[Character] eats foods that are not halal”), moral (“[Character] hits other people for no reason”), and conventional norms (“[Character] wears socks on [his/her] hands”). Children evaluated the permissibility, severity, and alterability of these norm violations for same-faith and other-faith characters. The data presented here is collected by the members of the Developing Belief Network, spanning 21 cultural groups, 6 religions, and 9 countries (see Figure 1). We found important developmental changes in children’s understanding of religious norms. With age, regardless of culture, religious affiliation, or country, children were increasingly likely to infer that the scope of religious norms is group-specific while moral norms apply to everyone (see Figure 2). Follow-up analyses reveal that these overall patterns held across cultures and religious groups. Furthermore, with age, children’s evaluations of same-faith protagonists became increasingly more severe for religious norm violations (more so than for conventional norms). These findings offer insights into the developmental roots of tolerance and conflict towards members of one’s religious group when they violate its norms. These findings also speak to ongoing theoretical debates on the extent to which different norms are treated as universal (for a review see Stich, 2018) versus increasingly limited in their scope with age (see Dahl et al., 2022). By capturing a diverse range of ages, cultures, and religions, these findings paint a comprehensive picture of how children’s perceptions of religious norms develop and change around the globe.

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