Familiar Magic Helps Children See That Fantastical Events Can Happen in Stories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Young children often show a reality bias when thinking about fiction—they say that stories can include realistic events, while rejecting fantastical events. We sought to better understand this bias by looking at circumstances in which it is reduced. In two experiments, children ages 3–7 (total N = 404) in Canada judged whether ordinary story protagonists could complete goals using magical items (e.g. a magic wand), as well as regular items useful or irrelevant for the goals. In both experiments, children at all ages mostly agreed that the characters could use the magical objects. Children, then, may overcome the reality bias when familiar fantasy elements help them envisage how fantastical events could happen in a story. At the same time, children still showed some signs of realism. They more strongly agreed that story characters could use the useful real-world than magical objects to complete the goals. Also, when realistic and fantastic ways of completing goals were pit against each other, children overwhelmingly said characters used the realistic method. We also found that the reality bias was not specifically affected by whether fantasy elements were introduced directly in the story or only later when children were asked about what could happen in the story. Overall, our findings suggest that although children are not strictly restricted to anticipating realism in stories, they strongly prefer it when it is directly compared with fantasy.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".