Happy to release a pre-print 5 years in the making! "A two-wave longitudinal study of children’s prosocial behavior during Christmas." It's currently under review at Current Research in Behavioral Sciences. Watch this space. osf.io/preprints/os... - ThreadSky

rkapitany.bsky.social • 184 days ago

Happy to release a pre-print 5 years in the making!

"A two-wave longitudinal study of children’s prosocial behavior during Christmas."

It's currently under review at Current Research in Behavioral Sciences. Watch this space.

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/e8jm6?view_only=

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rkapitany.bsky.social•184 days ago

I have to thank a range of collaborators include @kathrynbfrancis.bsky.social, @mattiwilks.bsky.social (from grad school!), Chris Kavanagh and Harvey Whitehouse.

So why did this take five years to execute, and what were you looking at?

Good question!

rkapitany.bsky.social•184 days ago

Children and their sincere belief in Santa are a good model for a devout religious community. More importantly, they're kids! It's really hard to ethically and pragmatically tinker with children's religious beliefs - but parents don't mind you tinkering with their Santa beliefs!

rkapitany.bsky.social•184 days ago

If we accept the premise that Santa is a morally concerned, semi-omnipotent, interventionists deity, and kids sincerely believe he's real and cares about their behavior (if they're naughty or nice), then it stands that kids should *act on their belief*.

rkapitany.bsky.social•184 days ago

But other theorizing by folks like Woolley reckon rituals and the cultural trappings of christmas provide evidence for Santa's reality. These might act as 'primes', or at least, as reminders, that Santa is writing a list and checking it twice.

rkapitany.bsky.social•184 days ago

So we wanted to know if belief, ritual, or anything else, influenced whether children acted better as the saliency of Santa and Xmas increased.

So in 2019, 2021, and 2022 we took baseline measures up to 6 weeks before xmas, and then again on December 26.

rkapitany.bsky.social•184 days ago

This is why it took so long to do this work. We had a brief window to actually collect data. And also, there was a global pandemic (if you recall).

Also, I got cancer at some point. I don't remember how, but somehow I collected the 2021 data from hospital bed while on fentanyl. Wild shit, man.

jjaron.bsky.social•183 days ago

This sounds very interesting, but unfortunately the link isn't working for me, either here or at the bottom of your thread! Could you post again? Thanks!

rkapitany.bsky.social•183 days ago

Someone else PM'd me. The pre-print is under moderation review. It should be available in about 24 hours. I should have planned ahead!

nknific.bsky.social•172 days ago

The link works now - this was actually fun to skim through! Cool study!

drboothroyd.bsky.social•184 days ago

This is so cool Rohan!

rkapitany.bsky.social•183 days ago

Thank you :)

And right now, we're collecting longitudinal data over 12 months on children's developmental beliefs about Santa (and many other supernatural agents).

theonlyname.bsky.social•183 days ago

Here from your Reddit post, very cool!

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