In the name of God: How children and adults judge agents who act for religious versus secular reasons

Abstract

Many people are guided by religious beliefs, but judgments of religiously and secularly motivated individuals remain unclear. We investigated reasoning about religiously versus secularly motivated characters among 5- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Study 1, theist and non-theist children reported similar attitudes toward theists; however, large differences emerged between theist and non-theist adults. Study 2 obtained similar results using a continuous, rather than forced choice, measure of preference. Additionally, Studies 2–3 tested two explanations for the stronger influence of religious background on adults’ versus children’s responses. Study 2 did not find strong evidence for the theistic majority account, which posits that the greater perceived prevalence of theists as compared with non-theists influenced children’s responses more than adults’ responses. The results of Study 3 were consistent with the intuition account, which argues that non-theist adults had effortfully overridden the teleological intuitions that may have influenced children’s responses in Studies 1–2 and potentially led children to prefer characters whose beliefs were in line with children’s own intuitions. The degree to which teleological intuitions persisted implicitly among adults predicted those adults’ pro-theist preferences. These findings offer connections between religious judgments and other areas of social cognition, such as social preferences and teleology.