[escepticos] Conducta y creencias sobrenaturales: interesante experimento

[Eduardo Peiré]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2012/09/04/imaginary-presidents-and-imaginary-gods-the-real-empty-chair-effect/

El experimento consiste tomar a un grupo de niños y enseñarles un juego qué únicamente consta de tres reglas. Una vez familizarizados con el juego, los niños se dividen en tres grupos, uno tutelado por un adulto colega, otro sin tutelar y uno tercero tutelado por el ser imaginario "ALice", representado por una silla vacía. AL otro lado de la habitación los padres observan -desapercibidos- la conducta de sus hijos. EL objeto de la prueba es establecer qué grupo es más tramposo..:

"So what did we find? Just as we expected, basically, and probably 
what you’d have as well. Those children who were randomly assigned to 
the “no supervision” condition were the most likely of the bunch to 
cheat when the experimenter exited the room. Nearly half of these kids, 
in fact, were so brazen in their transgressions that they simply walked 
right up to the wall and manually placed the ball on the target (usually
 just shy of the bulls-eye to cleverly simulate some relative degree of 
marginal error), thereby breaking all three rules at once! Those in the 
“invisible agent” condition, by contrast, were just as well-behaved when
 they thought Princess Alice was in the room as were those kids being 
watched by an actual, flesh and blood person sitting in the chair before
 them and supervising their behavior.
But there’s an important caveat, too. This rather astonishing 
Princess Alice effect only panned out statistically for those children 
who said that they believed that she was real. The more sceptical 
children in the “invisible agent” condition, by contrast, were just as 
likely to cheat when left alone as those in the “no supervision” 
condition. Yet even those who adamantly denied that Princess Alice was 
real during their initial introduction to her, when left alone in the 
room, seemed to display some curious signs of ambivalence about her. In 
fact, for those kids in the “invisible agent” condition that did cheat, 
the majority only did so after “disconfirming” her non-existence by running their hand across the chair. Some even “Eastwooded” her by speaking to her."