He's Gonna Find Out Who's Naughty and Nice

Santa’s Coming to Town

Santa’s Coming to Town

Over the past couple of decades scenes of anxious shoppers rushing the entrances of big box stores in the early morning hours of Black Friday to acquire door-buster bargains have threatened to overwhelm the rather more idyllic Christmas images of the past. Currier and Ives’ prints conjured up family members gathering for a festive holiday at beautifully decorated rural cottages in snow-covered landscapes. Traditional Christmas images carried unequivocal messages of kindness, fellow-feeling, and good cheer.

American retailers readily contributed to the transformation of the traditional Saint Nicholas into the merry old elf, Santa Claus. In his contemporary form, Santa Claus is a grandfatherly figure of unbounded jollity and generosity, who is alleged to deliver gifts to children the world over in a single night. The high-spiritedness of all of this and this bounteous demonstration notwithstanding, not even the most glittering visions of Santa in popular culture have managed to suppress completely a darker side to all of these dealings.

Although the song has a merry tune, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” explicitly warns listeners that Santa is, in fact, a moral monitor, who is in many ways like Big Gods. After all, Santa “sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake” and knows “if you’ve been bad or good.” The song then pivots to its somewhat misleading, prosocial, moral message – “so be good for goodness sake.” That message is misleading, since the entire system is built around rewards for good behavior and sanctions for untoward conduct. When I was a child, one threat was the possibility of receiving a box of ashes. This is not about goodness for its own sake. This is about gaining rewards and avoiding punishments.

Elves on Shelves and Krampus

A recent expression of this special moral monitoring around the Christmas season is the elf on a shelf. This involves a plausibly elfin figure, who takes up different positions in the house from one day to the next and whose job it is to monitor children’s behavior for the purpose of reporting back to Santa about who has been naughty and who has been nice. The elf is wise to remain out of reach in the face of young skeptics, who wish to put their suspicion that it is merely a doll to the test. An anecdote suggests that the elf’s cheerful expression and diminutive stature can be serious liabilities. After a time-out for a transgression, a five-year-old child of an acquaintance was subsequently overheard threatening the elf with bodily harm if it carried through on its report to Santa.

Still, this is benign when compared with Krampus, whom Melissa Eddy describes as “a devilish mountain goblin.” Throughout much of central Europe, Krampus’ arrival, announced by clanging cowbells, coincides with the festival of Saint Nicholas on December 6. Unlike the revered Saint Nick, however, this sinister looking, masked, goat-man, does not merely advertise the withholding of rewards with ashes. He carries switches with him for the thrashing of wayward children.

The Case for Krampus

So which of these arrangements, a jolly Santa or a menacing Krampus, is likely to elicit the desired, prosocial behaviors? Azim Shariff’s research points to a case for Krampus. Shariff has carried out both experimental and correlational studies.

Shariff and Ara Norenzayan carried out an experiment in which participants, when left alone in a room, were able to cheat on a computerized math test. Independent measures of participants’ religiosity showed that it had no effect on the probability of them cheating on the test, however, participants who had, in questionnaires administered a few days previously, favored conceptions of God as compassionate and forgiving, were significantly more likely to cheat than participants who had endorsed conceptions of God as wrathful and punishing.

Shariff and Mijke Rhemtulla carried out a fascinating correlational study that looked at the relationship between crime rates and relative levels of belief in heaven and hell across nations. Here higher percentages of religious believers in a population did make for lower crime rates, but it was belief in hell and, thus, in punishing gods, that appeared to be the relevant factor. Across all of the world’s major religions, nations with more widespread belief in hell among their citizens had the lowest crime rates, whereas those that downplayed punishing gods the most had the highest crime rates. The paper explored and ruled out on statistical grounds a variety of alternative explanations concerning factors known to affect crime rates such as nations’ overall wealth and their wealth inequality.

As the threatening five-year-olds’ behavior hints, it is probably a safe bet that the prosocial impact of Santa and elves on shelves pales in comparison to that of Krampus.