Prologue.
Ira Glass
Rebecca remembers exactly when she learned the astonishing truth. She was in second grade and ran into her best friend, Rachel, at school one day.
Rebecca
And she pulled me aside and said, you know, last night I lost a tooth and I woke up while the tooth fairy was putting the money under my pillow. And guess who the tooth fairy was? I said, oh, my god, who was it? I have to know. And she said, my dad. My dad is the tooth fairy.
And I remember running home after school and telling my mom, Mom, I know who the tooth fairy is and declaring it as if I had grown up, that I knew who the tooth fairy was. And she said, oh, well, who is the tooth fairy? And I turned to her and I said, Rachel's dad is the tooth fairy. Ronnie Loberfeld is the tooth fairy. And she said, I can't believe you know. It's totally secret. You can't let anyone else know. But you're right, Ronnie is the tooth fairy. And he works really hard and it's a secret so you can't let anyone else know. He is the tooth fairy, but you can't let anyone else know. And from that day on, Ronnie Loberfeld was the tooth fairy. And all of my notes under my pillow were signed, Love, Ronnie Loberfeld.
Ira Glass
Now in his day job, what did Ronnie Loberfeld do?
Rebecca
I think he did something in finance. He was either an accountant or a stockbroker. He worked next to a Stop and Shop in Massachusetts, in Newton. Had dark hair. Wore a suit. And I definitely had images of his driving his Volvo around the Boston area and delivering the tooth fairy treats.
I remember wondering what it was like for Rachel to know that her dad was the tooth fairy and definitely being a little envious that her dad had this special job and this special power and that he had this whole other interesting life, where my dad just came home from work and that was it.
Ira Glass
So when you would actually run into Ronnie Loberfeld, what was it like for you? How would you act?
Rebecca
I tried to act cool. You know, it's like if you're starstruck but you don't want them to know that you're starstruck.
Ira Glass
Just like meeting a celebrity.
Rebecca
Exactly. You downplay it. You try not to mention it, but you definitely check them out twice and look at them when they walk away. Like, oh, my god, you're the tooth fairy.
Ira Glass
But you knew enough to play it cool.
Rebecca
I knew enough to play it cool. I said, hey, how you doing? What's for dinner? How am I getting home tonight? Are my parents going to pick me up? Have they called?
Ira Glass
You did play it cool.
One interesting question in all of this. Why did both girls come to what seems like the least likely conclusion from the evidence in front of them? Of a parent swapping money for a tooth under a pillow? Well, Alison Gopnik studies how children think. And she says, of course it's logical for a seven-year-old to conclude that her own dad might be the tooth fairy.
Alison Gopnik
Children understand that their parents, for instance, are powerful in all sorts of ways that make them very different from children. Now from a child's point of view, knowing where those powers begin and end is pretty tricky. I mean, think about all the things that your parents can do that you can't do. And think about the fact that there isn't any obvious explanation about why your father can use a Visa card, for instance, which is something that you can't do. The power to be a tooth fairy isn't all that much more impressive.
Ira Glass
There's a certain kind of story that kids tell, like the Ronnie Loberfeld story, where they look at something going on around them, observe it carefully, think about it logically, how one thing connects to the next thing to the next, and then come to conclusions that are completely incorrect. Therapist [? Eileen ?] Goldman in Texas tells this story about a little girl on an airplane.
Eileen Goldman
And she was about four years old and her very first flight. And as the plane was airborne, she turned to the woman next to her and said, when do we get smaller? That had been her experience at airports watching airplanes take off. They do get smaller.
Ira Glass
These stories are like jokes, and they're also like poems, I think because there's this aha quality to them, some connection that's made between things, a surprising connection, a wrong connection, actually. Well, we at This American Lifelove these stories. And so today, we bring you a full hour of them. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.
Today on our program, kid logic. Our show in four acts. Act 1, baby scientists with faulty data. Act 2, werewolves in their youth. That story from Michael Chabon. Act 3, the game ain't over till the fatso man sings. Act 4, when small thoughts meet big brains. Stay with us.
Act One. Baby Scientists with Faulty Data.
Alison Gopnik
Because it turns out that babies are very interested in gravity and how gravity works. The fact that things fall down and not up is not obvious to babies. And it turns out another thing they're very interested in is human beings and how they work. We are actually the lab rats. They're actually doing experiments on us to see how we tick.
So when you play drop the spoon, you get two for the price of one. You get an experiment about gravity. You get a little physics tutorial. And you get a psychology tutorial. You can see about how that person will do something over and over again.
Ira Glass
Well, kids think with the same logic that adults use and apply that logic just as rigorously. There are certain things that they simply do not know and take a while to figure out. Up to six or seven years old, for instance, it's not exactly clear to anyone what is imaginary and what is not, or if wishing for something can make it come true.
Alison Gopnik
There's a wonderful experiment about this, actually, that Paul Harris in England did, where he got children to imagine that something was in a box. So he would say, OK, now here's this box. We're going to open it up. We're going to close it. Now let's imagine that there's a puppy in this box, or else let's imagine that there's a monster in the box. And he asked the children, is there really a monster in the box? Is there really a puppy in the box? They said no. They were just imagining it.
Ira Glass
Then the researcher would walk out of the room, leaving the box behind with the child. And then something funny would happen. The kids who were told to imagine a puppy in the box would go over and peek inside the box, just to check. And the kids who were told that there was a monster in the box? They would edge away from the box.
Alison Gopnik
So they weren't going to take any chances, just in case wishing actually could make monsters happen. They didn't want to take any chances about what was going on in that box. But by the time the children are six or seven, like grownups, they've understood that just wishing for things isn't going to actually make them happen.
Ira Glass
When they're still small and inexperienced about what happens in the real world, children have to make logical inferences all the time based on the data that they do have. Here is how children responded when our producer, Jonathan Goldstein, asked them about the tooth fairy.
Jonathan Goldstein
What do you think she does with all of these teeth that she's collecting?
Girl
Maybe she gives it to the people without teeth.
Jonathan Goldstein
Like who?
Girl
Old people.
Jonathan Goldstein
What do you think she does with all these teeth?
Boy
I really think she just likes to collect teeth and make things out of them.
Jonathan Goldstein
Like what kind of stuff?
Boy
Lots of stuff. Makes a tooth house, tooth trophy, and a tooth desk.
Jonathan Goldstein
How many teeth do you think it takes to make a tooth house?
Boy
100. 100.
Jonathan Goldstein
Why wouldn't she just make the house out of bricks like everyone else?
Girl
Because I don't-- because no one doesn't have brick teeth.
Ira Glass
These stories, where kids take a perfectly logical premise and go through a series of perfectly logical deductions that lead to perfectly incorrect conclusions, it turns out that science does not have a name for these stories, which is surprising, given how common they are and how they are recognized around the world for their sheer entertainment value. Here we've collected a few more.
Gianofer Fields
We lived in a duplex. The duplexes directly to the left and the right of us were aunts and uncles. Across the street from us, all aunts and uncles. So there was no such thing as walking out and seeing a stranger. I just thought we all looked alike. We all had common ancestries.
Well, when I became mobile, when I got my first tricycle, I could go a little bit further. So I ventured down the street. And I looked and I saw this couple sitting there, these two people. But they were people that I had never seen before. I had never seen anything like that because they were white people. And because I had never seen white people, I assumed that they were ghosts.
So I waved, like, I wonder if I wave, what kind of people are they? What do they do? Do they talk? So I waved, and I remember hearing the man going [COUGHING] And I thought, wow, that must be the way they talk.
It was like a scientific discovery. I discovered the first ghost people, and they talked to me. I communicated. I waved. They waved. I said hello, and they said hello in their language. [COUGHING]
Jack Hitt
Well, it all began at Christmas two years ago, when my daughter was four years old. And it was the first time that she had ever asked about what did this holiday mean. And so I explained to her that this was celebrating the birth of Jesus. And she wanted to know more about that. And we went out and bought a kid's Bible and had these readings at night. She loved them, wanted to know everything about Jesus.
So we read a lot about his birth and about his teaching, and she would ask constantly what that phrase was. And I would explain to her that it was "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." And we would talk about those old words and what that all meant, you know?
And then one day, we were driving past a big church, and out front was an enormous crucifix. She said, "Who is that?" And I guess I'd never really told that part of the story. So I had this sort of "Yeah, oh, well, that's Jesus. And I forgot to tell you the ending. Yeah, well, he ran afoul of the Roman government." This message that he had was so radical and unnerving to the prevailing authorities of the time that they had to kill him. They came to the conclusion that he would have to die. That message was too troublesome.
It was about a month later after that Christmas. We'd gone through the whole story of what Christmas meant, and it was mid-January. And her preschool celebrates the same holidays as the local schools. So Martin Luther King Day was off. So I knocked off work that day, and I decided we'd play and I'd take her out to lunch. And we were sitting in there, and right on the table where we happened to plop down was the art section of the local newspaper. And there, big as life, was a huge drawing by a 10-year-old kid in the local schools of Martin Luther King.
And she said, "Who's that?" And I said, "Well, as it happens, that's Martin Luther King. And he's why you're not in school today. So we're celebrating his birthday. This is the day we celebrate his life." And she said, "So who was he?" And I said, "Well, he was a preacher." And she looks up at me and goes, "For Jesus?" And I said, "Yeah. Yeah, actually, he was. But there was another thing that he was really famous for, which is that he had a message."
And you're trying to say this to a four-year-old. This is the first time they ever hear anything, so you're just very careful about how you phrase everything. So I said, "Well, yeah, he was a preacher and he had a message." She said, "What was his message?" And I said, "Well, he said that you should treat everybody the same no matter what they look like."
And she thought about that for a minute. And she said, "Well, that's what Jesus said." And I said, "Yeah, I guess it is. I never thought of it that way, but yeah." And that is sort of like, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." And she thought for a minute and looked up at me and said, "Did they kill him too?"
© 2016 This American Life