For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about a groundbreaking study investigating how children form beliefs about the supernatural.
Across cultures and throughout history, religion has always played a central role in what it means to be human, but psychologists have devoted relatively little attention to how children come to believe or disbelieve in supernatural beings. Is a predisposition toward such beliefs universally “hard-wired,” or are religious beliefs primarily learned through cultural exposure? This year, psychologists Rebekah Richert of University of California Riverside and Kathleen Corriveau of Boston University are launching an ambitious five-year project to begin addressing that gap, supported by a $9.9 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The grant is the second-largest ever made by the Foundation.
The project will build a collaborative research network of investigators, working at field sites around the world, with the task of developing and validating measures that will enable scientifically robust comparison of data across different cultural settings. After a call for proposals, Richert and Corriveau have selected eight research teams to join their own teams as the inaugural members of the network. Collectively, researchers will study children in sites across five continents, in 17 countries including Indonesia, Uganda, Bolivia, Lebanon, Israel, and India. They will develop a set of shared survey questions and techniques for children whose families represent more than a dozen religious traditions, and at sites where disparate traditions (like Buddhism and Hinduism in Singapore, or Catholicism and traditional Mayan religions in Mexico City), may have a combined influence on the development children’s belief. Together, the ten research teams will work to generate a body of new research on religious development during childhood while enlisting future partners to help the network engage in long-term projects that continue beyond the initial five years.