According to a new paper, the fear of ending up on Santa's Naughty list doesn't make kids behave better.
At Christmastime, children are often admonished to be good or end up on Santa's "naughty" list and receive only coal in their stockings. A study in the United Kingdom attempted to determine if believing in Santa improved kids' behavior. Reports from parents of 400 children ages 4 through 9 found that belief in Santa alone was not a strong predictor of "positive/prosocial behavior" as opposed to "negative/antisocial behaviors."
According to New Scientist:
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.
The results did show a correlation between participating in Christmas rituals and slight increases in positive behavior as Christmas day neared. However, more study is needed because those results did not appear in all three datasets.
The study is a preprint, meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Previously: There is a school where Santa Claus learns how to answer heartbreaking requests
