Rituals and Magical Beliefs in Children

Cultures are defined by their rituals. Some rituals are ubiquitous across cultures, such as marriage and holidays, whereas others differ across cultures, such as worship rites, rites of passage, oaths of allegiance, and the myriad rituals around birth and death. These rituals also vary in their expressive elements, ranging from hazing, self-mutilation, and animal sacrifice, to unique gestures, dancing, and food. Ritual is what brings us closer to our Gods and to each other, and perhaps what comforts us most in times of grief.

Given the importance of rituals in everyday life, it should come as no surprise that ritualistic behavior shows up even at the earliest stages of childhood. Children have been shown to mimic ritualistic behaviors while learning, despite the actions’ having no logical purpose. Why has evolution equipped us with such a predilection?

One reason is that developing humans like to take a precautionary approach. While learning, we reason, “Well, that seemed unnecessary… but she achieved her goal so it must have been done for a reason.” Other animals don’t do this to the same extent. Chimps, for example, have been shown to better ‘read between the lines’ and mimic only the necessary behaviors in order to execute an action. Humans, on the other hand, don’t like to miss steps, even if they appear purely performative. Rituals are also quite repetitive in nature, which might help with the memorization of new abilities and ensure that we give things more than one go.

A new paper by Anna Mathiassen and Mark Nielsen takes a closer look at the potential link between children witnessing ritualistic behaviors and their supernatural beliefs surrounding those rituals. Specifically, they investigated whether children would repeat ritualistic actions on an object if they watched an adult perform those actions. They also measured whether the child assigned supernatural powers to the object that was treated ritualistically rather than instrumentally.

Previous research has supported the idea that children like to replicate irrelevant actions, especially when the goal of the action becomes increasingly obscure. A 2018 study by Nielsen and colleagues showed that, when children 3-6 years old watch an adult perform unnecessary actions while opening a box, the children are more likely to repeat these behaviors when there is no clear goal to the behavior (i.e., the box is empty) than when there is (i.e., the adult retrieves a sticker from the box). This finding is in line with the precautionary approach aforementioned, as it shows that the more uncertain we are about why an action was performed, the more likely we are to repeat it, just to be safe.

An experiment by Hannes Rakoczy and others taught 2-3-year-olds to associate new actions with a pseudo word (e.g., “I’m going to show you how to ‘dax’”. Later, when a puppet ‘daxed’, the children would protest if it was done incorrectly. This illustrates that not only do children quickly learn to perform non-instrumental behaviors, but they also form normative beliefs about them.

What previous research has failed to demonstrate is the psychological mechanisms behind ritual and how these mechanisms lead to magical beliefs.

Mathiassen and Nielsen’s recent study establishes this link by investigating whether children will form magical beliefs about an object based on how an adult interacts with the object. Instead of seeing whether the child will imitate the irrelevant actions of an adult, this study solely focuses on the child’s beliefs about the object. They hypothesized that children will be more likely to ascribe magical powers to an object when the actions toward it seem opaque, and when the overall goal for engaging with the object is unclear.

The study involved using two identical percussion eggs, with one being designated as magical without revealing which one. The experimenters performed ritual behaviors with one egg (i.e., cleaning it with a tissue without actual contact, lifting it above their head, and looking at it reverentially). The other egg was treated instrumentally, with similar actions as before but this time with a logical purpose (i.e., actually wiping the egg with the tissue, inspecting it for dirt spots, and looking at it with a neutral face).

The children were then asked to repeat the actions of the adult, and at the end of the experiment, they were asked which object they believed to be magical.

Their results showed that children were more likely to believe that the ritualized object had magical properties than the instrumental object, and showed more protest when its magical properties were disputed (remember, the children were never explicitly told which object was magical). The authors also observed that the children also imitated ritual actions with higher fidelity than instrumental ones.

These findings show that children are quick to associate magic with ritualistic behavior, suggesting that supernatural beliefs have their roots in childhood. Children seem to have an urge to explain mysterious phenomena (in this case, ritualistic action), and recognize that the unexplainable is consigned to the supernatural realm.

We could walk away from this study concluding that kids are gullible, but a more charitable takeaway is that children have an impressive understanding of how reality should operate, and when this understanding is violated, they immediately understand it as supernatural.

This study also shows the power of cultural transmission via rituals. Kids seem to immediately recognize ritual as ritual, defend ritualistic behavior when challenged, and show a knack for remembering the sequences of ritualistic actions than instrumental ones. No wonder why rituals have a way of sticking around for millennia - we gravitate toward them at the earliest stages of our lives.

Though often illogical and supernatural, rituals play a powerful role in sharing beliefs and values, preserving cultural heritage and familial traditions, and promoting intergenerational understanding. Of course, ritual can be waved away as nonsense, or even be weaponized to build cults, justify violence toward animals, and scare the daylights out of children about hell, demons, and ghosts; or it can be used to preserve the most beautiful parts of our cultures and cherished as the robust educational tool that it is.

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