What we believed about the soul and afterlife as children is what we believe as adults, researchers say

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If you believed that Chuckie Cheese was heaven when you were a kid, there's a good chance you still believe that today.

According to a new study from Rutgers University, what we believe about the soul and afterlife as children shapes what we believe about them as adults - regardless of what we say.

"My starting point was, assuming that people have these automatic - that is, implicit or ingrained - beliefs about the soul and afterlife, how can we measure those implicit beliefs?" said Stephanie Anglin, a doctoral student in psychology in Rutgers' School of Arts and Sciences.

Anglin recruited 348 undergraduate psychology students for the study. The students, with an average age of 18, completed a survey about their current beliefs on the soul and afterlife, as well as their beliefs on both at the age of 10. What she found was that their explicit beliefs - or what they said they believed now - did not match their implicit beliefs. Instead, their implicit beliefs were more in line with what they believed as children.

Even when comparing implicit belief systems by religious affiliation, including believers and non-believers, Anglin found no difference. "That suggests that implicit beliefs are equally strong among religious and non-religious people," she said.

The results were not surprising. A 2009 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology asked participants to sell their soul to the researcher for $2 by signing a contract. "Almost nobody signed, even though the researchers told them it wasn't actually a contract and would be shredded right away," said Anglin.

For the current study, Anglin used the Implicit Association Test, a well known statistical tool, to assess the implicit beliefs of the participants. The test pairs two words at the top of a computer screen - in this case, "soul" paired with either "real" or "fake" to test beliefs about the soul, and "soul" paired with either "eternal" or "death" to assess beliefs about the afterlife. The student was then shown a series of words to choose from, indicating which words fit with the pair at the top of the screen.

"For example, if you had 'soul' and 'fake' on your screen, words like 'false' or 'artificial' would fit into that category, but words like 'existing' or 'true' would not," Anglin said.

Anglin is aware of the limitations of her study: namely, that she only examined beliefs about the soul and the afterlife and not about the relationship between those beliefs and beliefs about social or political issues, and that she had to rely on participants' memories. She would like to see these limitations lead to further research.

"It would be really useful to have a longitudinal study examining the same ideas," Anglin said. "That is, study a group of people over time, from childhood through adulthood, and examine their beliefs about the soul and afterlife as they develop."