Dragons and Dinosaurs: The Child's Capacity to Differentiate Fantasy from Reality

MORISON, PATRICIA, and GARDNER, HOWARD. Dragons and Dinosaurs: The Child's Capacity to Differentiate Fantasy from Reality. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 642-648. Despite the indisputable importance of fantasy in children's lives, little is known about their ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The present study was conducted to gain information on the extent to which this means of classifying experience is available to and used by children. In addition, the contributions of the power exhibited by a character, the source from which the character is drawn, and the competing modes of classification were assessed. A 3-card sorting task was administered to 20 subjects at each of 4 grades (K, 2, 4, 6). For each set, subjects were given 2 opportunities to make pairings and to offer explanations for their pairings. In addition, subjects were asked to place 20 pictures into piles of real and pretend figures. The results document a regular improvement with age in the use of fantasy classifications and explanations. Furthermore, fantasy groupings were more likely to occur when the competing mode of response was categorical and when the characters to be sorted were potent and were drawn from the same source. Fantasy explanations proved infrequent at the younger grades; moreover, children at all ages were less prone to offer fantasy explanations than to make fantasy pairings and to sort on that basis when explicitly instructed to do so.