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JoshuaZ comments on Expecting Short Inferential Distances - Less Wrong
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The young seem especially vulnerable to accepting whatever they are told. Santa Claus and all that, but also any nonsense fed to them by their schools. Schools for the young are particularly effective instruments for indoctrinating a population. In contrast, the old tend to be quite a bit more resistant to new claims - for better and for worse.
An evolutionary explanation for this is fairly easy to come up with, I think. Children have a survival need to learn as much as they can as quickly as they can, and adults have a vital role as their teachers. In their respective roles, it is best for adults to be unreceptive to new claims, so that their store of knowledge remains a reliable archive of lessons from the past, and it is best for the young to accept whatever they are told without wasting a lot of time questioning it.
I've just learned that there is interesting research on this topic. Sorry I don't have better links.
Interesting. Although that strongly suggests that children in fact are more gullible are specifically religious stories. I'd have to wonder if they are actually more gullible than those, have been primed to think that religious stories are allowed to have more fantastic elements and still be true, or have found out that expressing skepticism of such stories is more likely to result in negative consequences. The last seems unlikely to me.