HAPPY NOW?

Posted on by

WE WISH YOU a LOW TRUST CHRISTMAS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_societies
https://newscientist.com/is-christmas-better-now-its-over
Is Christmas better now it’s over? Don’t worry, that’s common /  23 December 2024

“Happy now? Assuming you are reading this issue promptly, it’s the post-Christmas lull: the weird interregnum between Christmas and the New Year when nobody is quite sure what to do with themselves (unless they are keen shoppers, in which case the January sales have you covered). Anyway, Feedback recently learned something new about Christmas. This snippet came courtesy of freelance writer Michael Marshall, who wrote a story about a study of whether children behave better in the run-up to Christmas. If you didn’t read it, the short answer is “no, they don’t”.

Parents, feel free to take a moment to grieve that one of your best levers to get the little blighters to behave apparently does literally nothing. We will add that the data did suggest that some types of behaviour improved if children were exposed to a lot of Christmas rituals, like putting up a tree and going carolling, and that these rituals might act as a kind of social glue encouraging kids to be kind and cooperative. Maybe try doing more of that? But we wouldn’t count on a miraculous transformation. That wasn’t the new thing, though. Michael, we understand, had to leave something out of the story for lack of space. So, since we’re in the post-Christmas period, let’s have some leftovers.

The study found that parents became more stressed as Christmas approached. In the run-up, they were often worried that it would be a disaster, that key presents wouldn’t turn up or that Great-uncle Ted would get drunk and say some slurs at the dinner table. This got worse in the week of Christmas, perhaps because they were working so hard preparing that they couldn’t relax and enjoy themselves. Apparently, it’s common for people to only see major rituals as positive experiences once they’re over. It’s certainly true of weddings, which people describe as the happiest day of their lives when they look back, but if you ask them on the day, they will say they are so nervous they feel like throwing up…”

 
BELIEVING in SANTA DOESN’T MAKE ANYONE NICER
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0234142#
https://newscientist.com/believing-in-santa-doesnt-make-children-act-nicer-at-christmas/
Believing in Santa Claus doesn’t make children act nicer at Christmas
by Michael Marshall  /  9 December 2024

“He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, but Santa’s festive surveillance seemingly does nothing to improve children’s behaviour. Instead, it may be that wider Christmas rituals, like putting up a tree and going carolling, can prompt children to be a bit nicer – a finding that may help us better understand how religion influences behaviour. “The question was, does belief in Santa Claus influence how children behave?” says Rohan KapitĂĄny at Durham University in the UK. “Does this belief, or anything about Christmas, actually make children behave nicely and not naughty?”


To find out, Kapitány and his colleagues ran a preliminary study over Christmas 2019. They skipped 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic, but ran larger follow-ups in 2021 and 2022. In total, they recruited more than 400 people in the UK with children aged 4 to 9. Like Santa, the team checked their work twice, interviewing parents once several weeks before Christmas and once in the week before Christmas Day. Each time, they asked the parents questions about their Christmas-related behaviours and their own feelings about the holiday, as well as about their children’s belief in Santa.

They also asked about three kinds of behaviour: prompted (“my child shared their toys after being prompted”), unprompted (“my child helped with household tasks without being prompted”) and deviant (“my child has lied”). According to the parents’ reports, there was no significant change in children’s overall behaviour between the two time points. “They don’t find evidence that kids are just behaving better as they approach Christmas time,” says Jane Risen at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the work. That is despite many parents saying they use Christmas as a tool to encourage prosocial behaviour, with promises of presents for good girls and boys.

However, Kapitány’s team did find a small improvement in prompted behaviours. When they drilled down into the data, they found that a child’s belief in Santa did not correlate with this improvement, and neither did the religiosity of the families. Kapitány says this is “not that big a surprise to me, because religious belief itself doesn’t tend to be a very powerful predictor of what people do”. Instead, the team found that children who were exposed to do more of the rituals of Christmas were more likely to perform more prompted prosocial behaviours.

Such rituals include putting up decorations, wearing unusual clothes like Christmas jumpers, going to Christmas events and eating festive foods. “Folks in Western society don’t tend to view Christmas as a ritual,” says Kapitány, but it matches the definition used by sociologists. He says the findings fit with existing data that a person’s social context is a better predictor of their actions than their beliefs. “Many devout theists do good things that are consistent with their beliefs, because the people around them share those beliefs and also do those good things,” he says. “It’s a reinforcing loop.”

However, Risen is more cautious about the purported link between Christmas rituals and children’s behaviour, because it did not show up in all three datasets. “There’s an interesting hypothesis here,” she says, but it needs “more confirmatory testing”, perhaps by randomly assigning children to be given strong reminders of Christmas and comparing them to others. Despite this, she says that studying children’s belief in Santa could yield real insights. Many studies have shown that priming people about religion, for instance by asking them to think about God, can subtly improve their behaviour – but this has only been studied in adults.

“Santa is such a natural place to think about it with kids,” she says. In general, ritual can reinforce beliefs in the supernatural, because the sheer amount of effort involved lends the belief credibility. “From a child’s point of view, adults and society generally wouldn’t engage in all of these otherwise unjustifiable behaviours, putting up trees inside your house, lighting the streets, wearing silly jumpers, eating different foods, singing different kinds of songs, unless what they believed was true,” says Kapitány. “So, from a child’s point of view, it is rational to believe in Santa, because adults engage in a vast conspiracy to convince them it’s true.”

Reference: OSF Preprints DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/e8jm6

 
NOW OUR KIDS THINK WE’RE ALL LIARS
https://scientificamerican.com/children-take-cues-from-adults-on-real-vs-make-believe
https://newscientist.com/why-adults-make-children-believe-in-santa
The surprising truth about why adults make children believe in Santa
by David Robson  /  16 December 2020

“…So much for the credulous young mind. In fact, research by Woolley and her colleagues suggests that children are less likely to believe in supernatural phenomena than adults. Arguably, many of the conspiracy theories flying around the internet are less convincing than the idea of a man flying around Earth delivering presents. Unlike young children, people who buy into such ideas are forgetting to check the expertise of their sources, to use their prior knowledge and to seek other evidence to gauge the reliability of an unlikely scenario.

The big question, though, is why we go out of our way to fool kids about make-believe characters. Woolley says there is no evidence that it harms children in the long term. With Santa, it might even make sense as a way to improve their behaviour. After all, he has god-like omniscience: he knows if you’ve been bad or good and may punish or reward as appropriate. Kapitány’s surveys indicate that many parents use this threat.

However, when he surveyed parents in the run-up to last Christmas, they reported that their children were just as naughty and no nicer than at any other time of year. Given Santa’s seeming inability to keep kids in line, Kapitány suspects that these festive rituals are more about familial bonding – not to mention the sheer fun of sharing a story. Parents are often more distressed than their children when the illusion is uncovered, he says. “The magic is for the parents.”

PREVIOUSLY

HOLIDAY ENTITLEMENT
https://spectrevision.net/2015/04/10/holiday-entitlement/
HOME for the HOLIDAYS
https://spectrevision.net/2020/12/26/home-for-the-holidays/
CHRISTMAS TRUCE
https://spectrevision.net/2014/12/26/crowd-control/

Related Posts:

Leave a Reply