children

January 30, 2014

Children, Social Cognition, and the Divine

Rebekah A. Richert is an Associate Professor of Psychology, and director of the Childhood Cognition Lab, at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on the cultural and social-cognitive dimensions of children’s understandings of religion, fantasy, and media. Richert’s latest project, supported by the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, examines how prayer practices and instruction shape children’s concepts of God and supernatural causality. On a recent afternoon, I spoke with Richert about her current work and its implications.

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Steven Barrie-Anthony: Your research looks at how children develop their understandings of religion, fantasy, and media. Why religion and fantasy?

Rebekah Richert: There are parts of our psychological experience that are captured by our religious beliefs, by our imagination and creativity, our fantasy lives, that are rarely able to be tapped into when we look at other more basic types of psychological processes. I’m interested in trying to understand some of the bigger and more abstract types of thought processes that we develop. And a way of doing that is studying how we think about abstract meaning-laden systems like religion.

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January 29, 2014

Prayers of a Phonographic Doll

[Editor’s Note: This essay resides within Anderson Blanton’s “The Materiality of Prayer,” a portal into Reverberations’ unfolding compendium of resources related to the study of prayer.]

Dolls and phonographs share an intimacy with prayer. One of the first commercially available cylinders from the Edison phonograph company, for example, was a component in the “Edison Talking Doll” (1888). Hidden within the sawdust-filled  recesses of this “Dollphone,” one of the interchangeable cylinders played upon the automatic phonograph was the ubiquitous bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” While Edison was busy manufacturing toy prayers, Emil Berliner, the pioneer of the flat “Gramophone” disc, was inscribing the first copies of “The Lord’s Prayer” in an old German doll factory (1889). Since the early days of phonography, praying dolls have been produced on a mass scale as a playful means to imprint pious attitudes upon the developing child.

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December 18, 2013

Prayers to Santa

[Editor’s Note: This essay resides within Anderson Blanton’s “The Materiality of Prayer,” a portal into Reverberations’ unfolding compendium of resources related to the study of prayer.]

 

Playful phenomena often reveal hidden or unacknowledged elements in the practice of prayer. Postcard images of praying children were widely circulated throughout the early twentieth century, and these representations of childhood piety helped to solidify particular understandings of prayer within the popular imaginary. These illustrations, moreover, provide a colorful testament to the “apparatus of belief,” or the ways in which the performative and experiential dimensions of prayer are inextricably related to physical objects that open communicative relays between the everyday and the sacred.

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November 19, 2013

Sisters and Brothers, “Spirit in the Sky” (1974)

In this cover version of Norman Greenbaum’s 1969 original, salvation becomes a social occasion, perhaps even a bureaucratic process. “Spirit in the Sky” is performed, here, by the hastily assembled Sisters and Brothers, who sing it as part of a “rock mass”—a concept made popular by the Australian nun Sister Janet Mead, in the early 1970s. Borrowing much from Mead’s production, the Sisters and Brothers offer a simple lesson to the children of the children of the Age of Aquarius. You must have a friend in Jesus. You must cultivate that friendship. You must secure his trust. If done properly, when you die Jesus will recommend you to the spirit in the sky. One enters heaven through the logic of the network. Jesus cannot guarantee. He can only recommend. The buck does not stop. Pray accordingly.

November 19, 2013

Marlene Hershey and the Hershey-ettes, “Whisper a Prayer” (1975)

A local favorite from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Marlene Hershey and the Hershey-ettes were masters of disharmony, perhaps the logic of prayer. Hershey hosted her own Christian-themed variety show—“Hearthside Hymns”—for 17 years on WGAL-TV in Lancaster. She also had a radio program on WBYO-FM in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, called “Musical Moments.” As her website proudly exclaims, “People still recognize her on the streets many years later.”

One is reminded here that celebrity is next to godliness, in that recognition—aimed directly at you, manifest in the particularity of people and their compliments, yet originating from an unrecognizable entity such as the public—is akin to mystical correspondence. Fame is a walking state of prayerfulness, in that fame confers upon the person a double-bind. On one hand, there is the sense of fulfillment and the capacity for self-recognition. On the other hand, there is the sense of evacuation and the encounter with dread. For, as in the act of prayer, the inexplicability of the transformation of self is directly proportional to the release of one’s image to the other and its subsequent circulations. This act, as Hershey reminds us, is best undertaken slowly, softly, and in a whispering mood.

April 8, 2013

Holy Cards

[Editor’s Note: This essay resides within Anderson Blanton’s “The Materiality of Prayer,” a portal into Reverberations’ unfolding compendium of resources related to the study of prayer.]

   

Simple wood-block print holy cards existed as early as the mid-fifteenth century, but it was the introduction of lithography at the end of the eighteenth century along with advances in modern printing that made possible the mass reproduction of holy cards and their wide distribution throughout the Catholic world in the modern era. Holy cards were everywhere in Catholic culture; they were one of the essential media of Catholic piety and social life. From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the cards shared a common devotional aesthetic. Jesus, the Blessed Mother, and the saints were depicted in warm colors, rich blues, reds, and browns that heightened the drama and emotional intensity of the imagery. The holy figures looked out from the cards at human affairs with plangent sympathy and concern.

Catholicism is a culture of sacred presence. Relics of saints (pieces of their bodies or objects touched to their bodies); water, soil, or other matter associated with sites of miraculous events; statues, images and crucifixes are all media of presence. (This is not an exhaustive list!) Holy cards belonged to this culture of presence too. This was most obvious in the case of cards that came with a miniscule relic affixed to them and visible in a small transparent window cut into the paper. One of the most popular holy cards of the twentieth century showed the southern Italian stigmatic Padre (now Santo) Pio, saying mass, his bloody hands folded in prayer, and included a tiny piece of stained fabric that had been touched to his wounds. But all holy cards were media of presence. The devout kissed them; they held them while they prayed; the cards were exchanged from hand to hand; they were tucked into the frames of bedroom mirrors and taped to walls. They were used in the making of household shrines. Holy cards were carried into all the spaces of the modern world, onto battlefields in soldiers’ pockets, for example, into industrial and post-industrial workplaces, and especially into hospitals.

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April 1, 2013

Children’s Understanding of Divine Minds and Prayer

Ideas about divine beings that possess extraordinary mental capacities, including omniscience, are found in the doctrines of many religions, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism. Such ideas are also integral to believers’ personal conceptualizations of divine beings. For years, I have been interested in how we come to cognitively represent or imagine the idea of an omniscient being; my PhD dissertation was focused on how this idea develops in children and adults. It turns out that this idea is grasped slowly over the course of development, and may not be firmly understood until adolescence or adulthood.

For example, 4-year-olds in the U.S., Spain, and Greece often report that God will be ignorant of things that ordinary humans will also be ignorant of—like the contents of unmarked closed containers. At this age, U.S. children also report that omniscient beings will be ignorant of occurrences in the distant past (what the first dog looked like long ago), and knowledge of people’s personal experiences; though children who are more heavily exposed to ideas about the Judeo-Christian God attribute more of such knowledge to other omniscient beings. By 5-6 years, children (at least those raised in the U.S., where Christianity is widely and openly practiced) attribute a much broader body of knowledge to omniscient beings than they do to ordinary beings—reporting that omniscient beings (but not ordinary humans) will indeed know about the distant past, people’s personal experiences, and many more things.

Yet at this age, children still don’t fully grasp the breadth of omniscient knowledge—they often report that all-knowing beings know many things but not everything. And they have a particularly difficult time conceptualizing the depth of omniscient knowledge—for example, they often report that a doctor knows more about medicine than an omniscient being, and that a mechanic knows more about cars than an omniscient being. It is not until late childhood that U.S. children grasp that an omniscient being possesses knowledge that exceeds even experts’ knowledge. Not only are these ideas difficult for children to grasp, adults may believe that their God knows everything and is all powerful, but in their everyday reasoning tend to conceive of their God’s powers as limited, constrained by space and time—for example, when asked to reason about a story where multiple people pray to God at the same time, adults tend to expect that God will attend to those prayers one at a time, rather than simultaneously.

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February 26, 2013

Investigating the Cognitive and Cultural Foundations of Prayer

Co-Principal Investigators include Henry Wellman and Margaret Evans.

We examine the development of prayer concepts, specifically concepts of petitionary prayer that makes requests of divine beings. Petitionary prayer is practiced by children and adults worldwide (BBC News, 2007; Pew Research Center, 2008; Pew Research Center, 2010). It is particularly interesting conceptually because it entails that we suspend many of our intuitions about the natural world. In our daily social interactions we lack telepathic skills and communicate by speaking aloud; further, we appreciate that people and objects are subject to inviolable laws of physics and biology. Yet, to fully grasp the significance of petitionary prayer requires that we conceptualize and believe: (1) in a being (God) who is not physically present yet can still perceive our words and, even more extraordinary, is aware of our unspoken thoughts; (2) that our prayers can yield physical outcomes without our physical intervention; and (3) that otherwise improbable or impossible phenomena (e.g., parting a sea, recovering from a terminal illness) are indeed possible with divine intervention.

Intellectual merit: Our research will examine how people come to represent these counterintuitive prayer concepts, a topic that can also shed light more generally on how counterintuitive spiritual ideas are cognitively represented and culturally transmitted. Limited prior research suggests that an understanding of prayer emerges and develops substantially during early and middle childhood (e.g., Bamford & Lagattuta, 2010; Woolley & Phelps, 2001), highlighting a particularly important period for research. But young children evidence cognitive limitations that may hinder their appreciating the three components of prayer described above, these include a difficulty conceptualizing extraordinary minds (Giménez-Dasí et al., 2005; Lane et al., 2010; Makris & Pnevmatikos, 2007); a disbelief that the improbable is possible (Shtulman & Carey, 2007); and disbelief in mental telepathy and psychokinesis (Bering & Parker, 2006; Woolley et al., 1999). Given such cognitive constraints, when and how do children fully grasp and believe in the goals and significance of prayer?

Research: To answer this question, Study 1 will examine when and how children and adults appreciate that an extraordinary being (the Judeo-Christian God) can perceive prayers, whereas ordinary humans cannot. Study 2 will examine reasoning about the efficacy of prayer relative to other psychological activities, like thinking and wishing. Critically, conceptual development is partly a function of culturally-provided information (Shweder et al., 2006). So, we will conduct studies with participants from different religious contexts. Moreover, we will collect data on participants’ religious background, including their exposure to and engagement in prayer. We will also assess other cognitive capacities that may support a developing understanding of prayer, including children’s ability to reason about improbable phenomena (Shtulman & Carey, 2007).

Broader impacts: Results from these studies will shed light on the cognitive and cultural foundations of prayer concepts that are held by millions of individuals worldwide, and in doing so will contribute to the cognitive science of religion. In particular, our studies will (a) contribute to understanding the cognitive and psychological dimensions of prayer, and will (b) serve as a cross-cultural comparative analysis of prayer. Moreover, our findings will inform parents and others about when children are most receptive to learning about different components of prayer.

February 26, 2013

The Role of Prayer in the Development of Religious Cognitions

Co-Principal Investigator is Nicholas Shaman.

Children’s religious concepts undergo significant transitions during the preschool years. Their understanding of ritual actions, God, and supernatural causality undergo qualitative shifts. Despite the dynamic nature of development during these years, little research has examined the cultural factors that contribute to preschool-aged children’s understanding of religious activities, like prayer. The proposed research is significant for advancing knowledge of how children’s understanding of and experience with prayer can shape their religious experiences and understanding. The guiding hypothesis of the project is children’s learning about and conceptions of prayer influence and is influenced by children’s understanding of religious entities and supernatural causality. The specific aim is to examine if differences in exposure to, understanding of, and participation in prayer are related to individual differences in the development of religious concepts during the preschool years.

The proposed research method will be a cross-sectional study conducted with children in the preschool years, which mark a transition period in the development of children’s religious cognition. Parent-child dyads, representing Catholic, Evangelical Christian, and Reform Jewish religious traditions, will participate in a one-time visit to the Childhood Cognition Laboratory at UC Riverside. Children will be between the ages of 3.5 and 5. The visit will be divided into two segments: parent survey/child interview and parent-child interaction. Children’s and parents’ concepts of God, supernatural causality, and prayer will be assessed through separate interviews with trained researchers. The measures will assess how children and parents attribute anthropomorphic attributes to God, how children and parents judge the possible occurrence of impossible events, and how children and parents view the purpose of the actions of prayer. Analyses will involve correlating these measures with one another as well as with aspects of the parent-child interactions. A long-term goal of this program of research is to increase awareness of different prayer practices as well as further understanding about the influence of different prayer practices on development.