Do children believe in souls?

© 2024 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

In many cultures, people believe in an afterlife, where “personhood” continues to exist in the absence of a physical body. Does this spiritual stance reflect an innate bias of human psychology? To find out, researchers have examined whether children believe in souls.

Imagine your body vanishes in a puff of smoke. You’re dead, or maybe you’ve been transformed, magically, into a rock or a tree. Would you feel sad about it?

If you take a strictly naturalistic view of the world, you probably say no — you wouldn’t feel anything at all. But ask kids, and you’ll likely get another answer. Kids often talk as if they believe in souls, as if a mind could exist without a body.

Natalie Emmons and Deborah Kelemen think this comes easily — that kids adopt these beliefs spontaneously, without being taught. And if the researchers are right, there are implications for understanding religions. Maybe religions are based, in part, on a widespread intuition. Maybe humans begin life with a cognitive bias for believing that our mental states can exist without any connection to flesh and blood.

But how can we be sure that kids arrive at these ideas on their own?

In many cultures, children are exposed to religious doctrines about an afterlife, one that presupposes that the human mind can outlive the body. If kids seem to believe in the existence of a supernatural mind — or an immortal soul — maybe that’s because they acquired these ideas through social learning.

The problem, then, is that we need to control for the influence of culture, and nobody wants to do that by subjecting children to long-term experiments. Who would be okay with randomly assigning kids to different cultural upbringings, just to test a theory about human supernatural intuitions? The results might be fascinating, but the study itself would be unethical.

So Emmons and Kelemen came up with a clever alternative. Ask children about their spiritual beliefs, but stick to questions that they are unlikely to have encountered before.

In particular, the researchers focused on the question of “prelife” — the idea that we might experience mental functions “during the period of time prior to biological conception.”

Notions of prelife are promoted in some cultures. But in others, these ideas are mostly ignored. So Emmons and Keleman set their sights on kids living in societies where people don’t talk about “prelife.”

“Did you exist before you were conceived?”

The researchers visited two groups of children in living in Ecuador:

• Kids growing up in an urban center near Quito (Ecuador’s capital city). These “city kids” were mostly raised in the Roman Catholic tradition.

• Kids from an indigenous population — the Shuar — who lived in a remote village in the Amazon basin. Their religious upbringing featured elements of Christianity and traditional indigenous beliefs.

Clearly, these children came from different cultural worlds. But they had something crucial in common: Neither group was exposed to cultural ideas about prelife.

What, then, would the kids say when researchers asked them about it? The researchers posed many questions to find out.

“Years ago, before your mother was pregnant with you, could your eyes work?”

“Could your heart beat? Could you be hungry?”

“Could you watch something? Listen to something?”

“Could you think things? Could you remember things?”

“Could you feel happy? Or feel sad? Or want something?”

What did kids say about their “pre-life” existence?

In part, the children’s answers depended on age.

When the researchers tested for comprehension of the questions, they found that the youngest children in the study (5- and 6-year-olds) didn’t really understand what “prelife” meant — they confused it with being a fetus.

So the researchers focused on the remaining kids, and they found a clear trend: The youngest children who understood the concept of prelife (7- and 8-year-olds) were also the most likely believe in it. And they were much more likely to associate prelife with psychological experiences (like feeling happy or sad) than with physiological functions (like having eyes that work, and being able to watch something).

For instance, whereas most 7- and 8-year-olds rejected the idea that their prelife selves had possessed functioning eyes or beating hearts, a majority of them said they had emotional states, offering explanations like ““I felt happy because I wanted my parents’ love.”

And while the 11- and 12-year-olds were overwhelmingly against most claims about prelife, a sizable portion of these kids — 25-30% — agreed that their prelife selves had experienced emotions.

But while kids associated prelife with emotions, they were less likely to say that their disembodied selves could see, think or remember

Indeed, even the youngest children tended to argue against suggestions that they could watch things, or have thoughts, or remember stuff. Among the Shuar and the city kids, a majority of all age groups said these experiences weren’t possible if you don’t have a physical form.

And interestingly, researchers observed a similar pattern among a third set of children — kids raised in a culture that promotes the concept of prelife.

What do children believe when they are exposed to religious teachings about prelife?

In a study led by Deborah Kelemen and Natalie Emmons, researchers recruited 59 children from families who were very active in the LDS church. Such kids were of special interest to the researchers, because LDS children receive explicit, theological instruction in a doctrine of “prelife.” From the preschool years onward, they are taught that all people experience a “premortal” existence, during which time they can think, learn, and remember.

So we might expect that LDS children would endorse all of these concepts from an early age. But that isn’t what the researchers found. When asked about “premortal time,” most 7- and 8-year-olds said they had experienced happiness and sadness, but not thinking, learning, or remembering.

It wasn’t until kids were older (around 11 or 12) that they showed full acceptance of LDS doctrine — agreeing that their premortal selves could also think, learn, and remember. As the study authors argue, it was as if it was easy for younger children to believe the part about emotional states…and much harder for them to extend their beliefs to more knowledge-oriented, “epistemic” states (Kelemen et al 2021).

The researchers see this as added evidence that younger children are “intuitive eternalists” – inclined to believe in a kind of immortal soul, albeit one that is focused on emotional capacities — not conscious thoughts. If there is an intuition that guides kids in early life, it’s the belief that we can experience certain emotional states without having a living body.

Does this mean that humans are “hardwired” to believe in the immortality of the soul?

Studies like these can’t prove the point. Even assuming the children in the first study hadn’t encountered any prelife theories before, they might have relied on cultural ideas about the afterlife to answer the researchers’ questions.

But the research does suggest that kids are inclined to think that emotional states can float free — independent of any biological machinery. And the investigators think this pre-existing intuition makes it easier for kids to absorb religious doctrines about the existence of a supernatural soul.

More readings

If this article interested you, you might enjoy some of my other articles about the ways that children think. These include

References

Emmons NA and Kelemen D. 2014. The development of children’s prelife reasoning: evidence from two cultures. Child Dev. 85(4):1617-33.

Kelemen D, Emmons NA, Brown SA, and Gallik C. 2021. Beliefs about Origins and Eternal Life: How Easy Is Formal Religious Theory Development? Journal of Cognition and Development, 22: 356 – 378.

Portions of the text appeared in a publication Gwen Dewar for BabyCenter in 2014. Gwen Dewar retains the copyright, and has updated the information to reflect more recent research.