![]() ![]() ![]() One study by Jacqueline Woolley at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) found that more than 80 per cent of 5-year-olds in the US are convinced of his existence. It was only in the 19th century that he took on the familiar form of a jolly old man sitting in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.īeliefs in Santa are incredibly prevalent among children in many Western countries. Even then, he was often portrayed as a fearsome figure. The real Saint Nicholas was born in the 3rd century AD, but it would take around 900 years for him to be recognised as a patron of children and the magical bearer of gifts. The answers could have surprising implications for our understanding of young minds, conspiracy theorists and rituals.Īs fairy-tale figures go, our modern Santa Claus is a rather recent invention. He wants to know why some kids are more likely to believe in the supernatural than others, what makes Santa more plausible than other fictional figures and why we lie to our offspring in this way. This time, he is probing the ways that children tell fact from fiction. Two decades later, Kapitány – now a psychologist at Keele University, UK – is investigating Father Christmas again. “That was the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, of my belief in Santa,” he says. With his scepticism growing, he even hatched a plan to check his parents’ ATM receipts. Every Christmas, like many Australian kids, he had left out an apple and a carrot for the reindeer and a cold beer for the man himself – and every year, he found half-eaten snacks and an empty glass alongside a pile of presents the next day. ROHAN KAPITÁNY was 7 when he started to question the existence of Santa Claus. The rituals we build around Santa may be more for our benefit than for our children’s ![]()
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