Is What Mickey Mouse Says Impossible? Informant Reality Status and Children’s Beliefs in Extraordinary Events

Abstract

ABSTRACT As children get older, they become better able to discriminate between impossible and improbable statements and they realize that improbable events can occur in reality while impossible ones cannot. However, when children hear about extraordinary events from fictional entities (e.g., popular characters from children’s media), they may be more likely to doubt that the events can occur in reality. The current studies examine how an informant’s reality status and familiarity influence children’s belief in statements about improbable and impossible events. Across two studies, children ages 4, 6, and 8 (N = 362) heard impossible and improbable statements from an unfamiliar person, a familiar character, or an unfamiliar character (Study 1) or a real or pretend person (Study 2) and judged whether each statement could happen in reality. As in previous studies, older children were more likely than younger children to believe improbable events could occur. Additionally, for both types of statements, children’s judgments about the possibility of the events were similar regardless of the informant. These results suggest that when children hear extraordinary statements described by fictional characters, they pay more attention to the content of the statement than to the source.