Abstract
Two theoretical stances and their corresponding bodies of research are currently used to account for the development of children’s concepts of death and afterlife . Bering and colleagues have found that very young children often report that mental capacities persist in deceased animals, and that this tendency decreases across childhood but is still present in adulthood. In contrast, others have found that children’s supernatural accounts of the afterlife—including reasoning about a persisting soul, meeting a deity, or going to heaven—gradually increase during middle childhood. At first blush, these two accounts appear to sharply contrast. How can children’s reasoning about life-after-death both decrease and increase during childhood? We found that by sampling a broad age range of Chinese children and by taking into consideration the context in which death is discussed (medical or religious), these bodies of research can be seen as complementary rather than contradictory.
The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62954-4_14
For a more detailed overview of the methodology used in this study, please see: Lane, J. D., Zhu, L., Evans, E. M., & Wellman, H. M. (2016).
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Zhu, L. (2017). Do Chinese Children Believe in an Afterlife?. In: Hornbeck, R., Barrett, J., Kang, M. (eds) Religious Cognition in China. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62954-4_10
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