Abstract:

Children’s awareness of their own uncertainty (i.e., uncertainty monitoring) is in the process of developing even while their beliefs about the world are still forming (Lyons & Ghetti, 2011). This emerging awareness of certainty occurs during a developmental period in which children are also coming to understand the varying mentalizing capabilities of different kinds of agents (Wellman & Liu, 2004; Rohwer et al., 2012). Existing studies, for example, have found variations in the kind of knowledge 4- to 7-year-old children attribute to humans and to religious-supernatural agents, such as God (e.g., Barrett et al., 2001; Lane et al., 2010; Heiphetz et al., 2016). Furthermore, children are more likely to report certainty in their knowledge about natural scientific entities than religious-supernatural entities (see Payir et al., 2024). The present study explores the interplay between developing beliefs about minds of religious-supernatural and human agents and developing certainty about these beliefs. 

To investigate these dual processes, this poster will describe the findings from a preregistered set of secondary data analyses. These analyses will test hypotheses about children’s ratings of their certainty about their beliefs in the context of a theory of mind task testing perspective taking (Richert & Barrett, 2005; Richert et al, 2017). Analyses will utilize a private dataset containing a six-wave longitudinal study (collected: 2013-2019). Children (N = 219 ; range = 3.3-6.9 years; mean = 4.7 years; SD = 0.81) completed a visual perspective taking task in which they were asked if they believed that three different agents (i.e., mother, gender-matched doll, God) knew what a difficult-to-see drawing was on a piece of paper (e.g., a smiley face which looked like a dot from afar). Children indicated if each agent knew or did not know what was on the paper, and then were asked if they were ‘really sure’, ‘a little sure’, or if they didn’t know.

Here, we will run two complementary, non-nested structural equation models: one testing children’s attributions of the agents’ knowledge about a novel stimulus (i.e., agent knowledge), and the other targeting children’s certainty about their beliefs (i.e., certainty). Analyses will investigate how agent knowledge and certainty differ by agent type, and how those differences are predicted by children's religious affiliation, religious engagement, and age. Results from these analyses will expand our understanding of how children’s certainty about what different agents know is related to their developing cognitive skills and their experiences, and inform our understanding of the complex interplay between uncertainty monitoring and belief formation.