Heâs making a list, heâs checking it twice, but Santaâs festive surveillance seemingly does nothing to improve childrenâs 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 â a finding that may help us better understand how religion influences behaviour.
âThe question was, does belief in Santa Claus influence how children behave?â says at Durham University in the UK. âDoes this belief, or anything about Christmas, actually make children behave nicely and not naughty?â
To find out, KapitĂĄny 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.
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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 childrenâs belief in Santa. They also asked about three kinds of behaviour: prompted (âmy child shared their toys after being promptedâ), unprompted (âmy child helped with household tasks without being promptedâ) and deviant (âmy child has liedâ).
According to the parentsâ reports, there was no significant change in childrenâs overall behaviour between the two time points.
âThey donât find evidence that kids are just behaving better as they approach Christmas time,â says 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, KapitĂĄnyâs team did find a small improvement in prompted behaviours. When they drilled down into the data, they found that a childâs belief in Santa did not correlate with this improvement, and neither did the of the families. KapitĂĄny says this is ânot that big a surprise to me, because religious belief itself doesnât tend to be a very powerful predictor of what people doâ.
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.
âFolks in Western society donât tend to view Christmas as a ritual,â says KapitĂĄny, but it matches the definition used by sociologists. He says the findings fit with existing data that a personâs social context is a better predictor of their actions than their beliefs. âMany 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,â he says. âItâs a reinforcing loop.â
However, Risen is more cautious about the purported link between Christmas rituals and childrenâs behaviour, because it did not show up in all three datasets. âThereâs an interesting hypothesis here,â she says, but it needs âmore confirmatory testingâ, perhaps by randomly assigning children to be given strong reminders of Christmas and comparing them to others.
Despite this, she says that studying childrenâs belief in Santa could yield real insights. Many studies have shown that , for instance by asking them to think about God, can subtly improve their behaviour â but this has only been studied in adults. âSanta is such a natural place to think about it with kids,â she says.
In general, ritual can reinforce beliefs in the supernatural, because . âFrom a childâs point of view, adults and society generally wouldnât 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,â says KapitĂĄny. âSo, from a childâs point of view, it is rational to believe in Santa, because adults engage in a vast conspiracy to convince them itâs true.â
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