Hell and Cognitive Development

I was recently directed to a post by Keith DeRose, Yale professor, regarding the psychological impact of believing in hell, particularly upon children. The part of Keith's post that grabbed my attention was his psychological theory as to why hell so terrorizes children under the age of 12:

By 12, I wasn't any longer really terrorized by hell, though I still accepted a very nasty, traditional doctrine of hell - as I did all the way into my early 20s. (When I accepted the doctrine but was no longer terrorized by it, I did find it curious that I wasn't so terrorized.) Why do some people who accept a traditional doctrine of hell experience debilitating terror of it, while others don't? Why was I terrorized at 7, but not at 12? Why does debilitating terror tend to occur among children (though some adults also suffer from it)? These are questions that I hope receive some serious investigation. (And, again, if anyone knows of any studies of this, please let me know.) All I can do is provide my own (non-expert) guess, which is based just on my own case and that of several other people I've talked to.

My guess is that debilitating terror of hell is (at least often) explained by the subject getting or having one cognitive ability before or without having another (or having one of them to a much greater extent before or without having the other to a significant enough extent): Having the ability to understand and appreciate the doctrine without (yet) having developed the ability to "quarantine" threatening "beliefs" from having the effects beliefs of that content in some sense should have. (Since this - and especially my use of "quarantine" - is all very vague, perhaps this shouldn't even be thought of an explanation so much as my guess as to the form that the right explanation will take.)

I think Keith is correct in his theory. Although I know of no formal empirical tests of his hypothesis, his argument does fit with what we know concerning childhood cognitive development.

What I think is happening is this. According to Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, children around the ages of 7 to 11 are in the Concrete Operations phase of cognitive development. In this phase of development children begin to develop logical abilities but without the ability for abstraction. To understand the difference view the following YouTube clip:



Note the answers the children give when in the Concrete Operations stage:

Q: What would life be like if you had no thumbs?
A: You would only have four fingers.
A: You couldn't give someone a thumbs up.
A: You couldn't thumb wrestle.

Those answers are fine, but very concrete. Very tied to physical particulars. By contrast, the adolescent at the end of the clip is in the Formal Operations stage where abstract reasoning comes into its own. Thus, we see the Formal Operations child give a very abstract answer, an analogy between being without thumbs and living life as a left-handed person.

Going back to Keith's post, my hunch is that hell is most terrifying for children in the Concrete Operations stage. In this stage children have the concrete, logical ability to work out the calculus of salvation and damnation. Abstractions such as grace are beyond them, cognitively speaking. A concrete punishment/reward calculus better suits the cognitive stage they are in. And by doing the theological math unattenuated by abstractions such as grace most Concrete Operational children conclude they are doomed to hell.

Worse, they don't think of hell in abstract terms (e.g., "separation from God"). They think of hell in concrete, brutally physical images. Think back to the YouTube clip. What would life be like if you had no thumbs? You'd only have four fingers. You can see how that reasoning would play out concerning hell. What is hell like? It's a place of burning fire. In short, Concrete Operational children are not thinking of hellfire metaphorically or as an abstraction. They are thinking of the fire concretely, as fire. Literally. I doubt, once into the Formal Operations stage, many people see hell as being literally a place of fire. True, they don't imagine it as a day at the beach, but they don't concretely imagine that they will be able to smell their own flesh burning. They know hell will be bad, but they understand hellfire to be an abstraction and that understanding grants a bit of emotional distance. I think it is this distance that is the mechanism behind Keith's postulate of a quarantining ability.

All this is a guess of mine, an application of Piaget's stages to Keith's observations. Empirical laboratory work would be needed to really nail this down.