Stories are a central way that we pass information to
people. The beauty of stories is that they
embed real cultural wisdom in a specific context. They are easy to remember. They capture people’s attention. For all of these reasons, we often use
stories to help people learn new strategies for dealing with life.
When we tell stories to young children, though, we often
make them even more interesting by introducing fantasy elements. Aesop’s fables were about animals rather than
people. Picture books are filled with
stories of fairies, witches, unicorns, and princesses from faraway lands.
There are lots of goals for telling stories to children, but
there is often at least some attempt to teach kids something about life. When we hope to educate, does it matter
whether the stories are about the real world or about fantasy?
This question was explored in a series of studies published
in 2009 in the Journal of Cognition and Development
by Alison Shawber, Ruth Hoffman, and Marjorie Taylor. In these studies, children were told stories
about people or fantasy characters who had to solve a problem. For example, a character might carry a number
of apples by wrapping them up in a blanket.
Later, the children would be exposed to a problem like having to carry a
lot of marbles. They were given many
objects to solve this problem including a towel. The correct answer was to wrap the marbles up
in the towel, just as the character in the story wrapped up the apples.
In one study, younger children (about 4-years old) and older
children (about 5-years old) were told one story about a real child and a
second story about a fairy that solved a different problem. The solutions associated with the real child
and the fairy were varied across children, so that the influence of the
character was not related to the specific solution presented in the story.
After hearing the stories, children were given a chance to
solve a problem similar to the one described in the story. If they could not solve it on their own, they
were given a hint to use the story. At
the end of the experiment, the children were asked which story they would like
to hear again as a measure of whether they preferred the story about the child
or the story about the fairy.
Overall, children were more likely to solve the problem when
it was told about a real child than when it was told about a fantasy
character. About 75% of the children in
the study solved the problem with or without a hint when it was about a real
child, but only about 50% solved it with or without a hint when it was about a
fairy.
Another interesting result was that the younger children who
preferred the story about the fairy to the story about the child had much more
difficulty solving the problem than the older children who preferred the story
about the fairy. So, there seems to be a
trend where children gradually learn to extract the solution from fantasy setting.
Putting all of this together, it suggests that young
children find may find fantasy characters interesting, but they have a hard
time learning the point of the story when it is embedded in a fantasy
situation. They find it easier to understand
the point of the story when it is about real people. The older children who liked fantasy stories
tended to get better at solving the problem, but even they were much worse
overall than the ones who heard the story about the real child.
This work suggests that when stories are being told to teach
children rather than just to entertain them, it might be best to focus those
stories on realistic settings rather than fantastic ones.
