Make Believe Unmakes Belief?: Childhood Play Style and Adult Personality as Predictors of Religious Identity Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Links between current religious status and both childhood play style and adult personality (Five-Factor Model) were explored in a Canadian undergraduate sample. The lifelong religious reported being less open to experience, but more agreeable and conscientious, relative to apostates (who left their childhood faith for no faith), switchers (who migrated to a different faith), converts (who adopted faith since childhood), and the lifelong nonreligious. Relative to the two lifelong groups, apostates and switchers—and, to a lesser extent, converts—reported stronger interest and engrossment in pretend play involving props, peer collaborators, and/or imaginary characters, as well as less interest in organized sports. A childhood predilection for pretend play may function as a marker of greater ability and willingness to consider the implications of experiencing the self in different roles in an “as if” world. In turn, this predisposition may eventuate in a significant ideological shift in response to unmet cognitive and/or emotional needs, consistent with current understandings of religious change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".