The Guardian has a report on an academic study regarding the characters in children’s stories:
Forget the morals that millennia of children have learned from the Hare and the Tortoise and the Fox and the Crow: Aesop would have had a greater effect with his fables if he’d put the stories into the mouths of human characters, at least according to new research from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). …
Before they were read the story, the children chose 10 stickers to take home and were told that an anonymous child would not have any stickers to take home. It was suggested to the children that they could share their stickers with the stickerless child by putting them in an envelope when the experimenter was not looking. After they had been read the story, the children were allowed to choose another 10 stickers, and again asked to donate to the stickerless child.
The study, which has just been published in the journal Developmental Science, found that those children who were read the book with human characters became more generous, while “in contrast, there was no difference in generosity between children who read the book with anthropomorphised animal characters and the control book; both groups showed a decrease in sharing behaviour,” they write.
The academics, led by Patricia Ganea, associate professor of early cognitive development at OISE, said that existing studies using the same method showed that before they are six, “children share hardly any stickers with their friends, and even after age six, children keep most of the stickers for themselves”, so the task “offers a lot of room for children to change their sharing behaviour after reading the story”.
But reading a book about sharing “had an immediate effect on children’s pro-social behaviour”, they found. “However, the type of story characters significantly affected whether children became more or less inclined to behave pro-socially. After hearing the story containing real human characters, young children became more generous. In contrast, after hearing the same story but with anthropomorphised animals or a control story, children became more selfish.”
Which is not all that surprising. While the same impetus drives all species, which is for the reproductive members to survive long enough to reproduce successfully, there are a multitude of methods, and associated, if implied, rules (read: moral systems) for succeeding. Within the single species homo sapiens many moral systems are found, which may make homo sapiens unique.
The key to most stories is a character to which you can build a reasonable sympathetic link, and then through that link learn lessons concerning situations which you may encounter. If you look at a character and it appears to be another species, then it’s reasonable, even for children, to wonder about the real-world moral system vs the one presented. After all, if nothing else they look different in fundamental ways. By creating that question mark in the reader’s mind, the strength of the lessons are diluted.
Not everyone agrees with the study’s conclusion:
Chris Haughton, author and illustrator of animal picture books including Oh No, George! and Shh! We Have a Plan, felt that while “a simple instructional moral message might work short term”, the stories that have longer impact are the ones that resonate deeply. “I read Charlotte’s Web as a child and I know that made a big impression on me. I thought about it for a long time after I read the story. I identified with the non-human characters. That, among other things, did actually turn me into a lifelong vegetarian. I think a truly engaging and quality story that resonates with the child will be replayed in their mind and that has the real effect on them and the course of their life,” he said.
I, on the other hand, do not recall non-human characters having that sort of impact, despite being a bookworm throughout childhood. I actually actively have avoided stories such as The Lion King because I anticipated the cognitive dissonance of some predator playing King over herbivores and the like to be quite painful – at least as an adult.
On the other hand, how does this play out with science-fiction characters, specially those of the extra-terrestrial variety? I’m not talking about UFO conspiracies and the Greys, but sophisticated SF stories in which characters from other planets make a substantial contribution to the story. Of course, the best SF would include moral systems reflective of the conditions of the extra-terrestrials, which is a bit of a row to hoe; an example is in the Enterprise episode “Cogenitor,” in which an ET species named the Vissians require three individuals to reproduce, one representative of each of three genders, and one of them is deliberately kept in a state of complete ignorance: members of this gender can hardly communicate. One of the Enterprise crew members discover it is quite intelligent and, through interaction, begins to increase its knowledge level relatively quickly. Eventually, it suicides, ruining the chance of the alien triad to reproduce.
Would such a story have much of an impact on a child?
Katherine Martinko of Treehugger.com obviously has a different opinion on the purpose of stories in our species:
As for this question of morality, though, I can’t help but wonder why imparting a moral lesson is considered so important. To put it bluntly, who cares? Kids should be reading books for the sake of reading, because they are interested and amused, not because there always has to be a life lesson takeaway.
I think Katherine has this precisely backwards, although I’ll grant it’s not obvious. While we’re certainly offering moral lessons through our stories, it’s not that we’re pressing them on poor, unsuspecting children who’d as lief not have them. The reality is we’re offering them to children who are desperately looking for the rules of how life works – as befits any living creature out to help the species survive, either through reproduction or through other services.
So, Katherine asks who cares? The children care.
