He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, but Santa’s festive surveillance seemingly does nothing to improve children’s behaviour. Instead, it may be that wider Christmas rituals, like putting up a tree and going carolling, can prompt children to be a bit nicer – a finding that may help us better understand how religion influences behaviour.
“The question was, does belief in Santa Claus influence how children behave?” says at Durham University in the UK. “Does this belief, or anything about Christmas, actually make children behave nicely and not naughty?”
To find out, Kapitány and his colleagues ran a preliminary study over Christmas 2019. They skipped 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic, but ran larger follow-ups in 2021 and 2022. In total, they recruited more than 400 people in the UK with children aged 4 to 9.
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Like Santa, the team checked their work twice, interviewing parents once several weeks before Christmas and once in the week before Christmas Day. Each time, they asked the parents questions about their Christmas-related behaviours and their own feelings about the holiday, as well as about their children’s belief in Santa. They also asked about three kinds of behaviour: prompted (“my child shared their toys after being prompted”), unprompted (“my child helped with household tasks without being prompted”) and deviant (“my child has lied”).
According to the parents’ reports, there was no significant change in children’s overall behaviour between the two time points.
“They don’t find evidence that kids are just behaving better as they approach Christmas time,” says at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the work. That is despite many parents saying they use Christmas as a tool to encourage prosocial behaviour, with promises of presents for good girls and boys.
However, Kapitány’s team did find a small improvement in prompted behaviours. When they drilled down into the data, they found that a child’s belief in Santa did not correlate with this improvement, and neither did the of the families. Kapitány says this is “not that big a surprise to me, because religious belief itself doesn’t tend to be a very powerful predictor of what people do”.
Instead, the team found that children who were exposed to do more of the rituals of Christmas were more likely to perform more prompted prosocial behaviours. Such rituals include putting up decorations, wearing unusual clothes like Christmas jumpers, going to Christmas events and eating festive foods.
“Folks in Western society don’t tend to view Christmas as a ritual,” says Kapitány, but it matches the definition used by sociologists. He says the findings fit with existing data that a person’s social context is a better predictor of their actions than their beliefs. “Many devout theists do good things that are consistent with their beliefs, because the people around them share those beliefs and also do those good things,” he says. “It’s a reinforcing loop.”
However, Risen is more cautious about the purported link between Christmas rituals and children’s behaviour, because it did not show up in all three datasets. “There’s an interesting hypothesis here,” she says, but it needs “more confirmatory testing”, perhaps by randomly assigning children to be given strong reminders of Christmas and comparing them to others.
Despite this, she says that studying children’s belief in Santa could yield real insights. Many studies have shown that , for instance by asking them to think about God, can subtly improve their behaviour – but this has only been studied in adults. “Santa is such a natural place to think about it with kids,” she says.
In general, ritual can reinforce beliefs in the supernatural, because . “From a child’s point of view, adults and society generally wouldn’t engage in all of these otherwise unjustifiable behaviours, putting up trees inside your house, lighting the streets, wearing silly jumpers, eating different foods, singing different kinds of songs, unless what they believed was true,” says Kapitány. “So, from a child’s point of view, it is rational to believe in Santa, because adults engage in a vast conspiracy to convince them it’s true.”
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