Causal Asymmetry Across Cultures: Assigning Causal Roles in Symmetric Physical Settings

Causal cognition in the physical domain has been treated for a long time as if it were (1) objective and (2) independent of culture. Despite some evidence to the contrary, however, these implicit assumptions have been rarely ever explored systematically. While the pervasive tendency of people to consider one of two equally important entities as more important for bringing about an effect (as reported by White, 2006) meanwhile provides one type of counter-evidence for the first assumption, respective findings remained mute to the second. In order to scrutinize how robust such tendencies are across cultures – and, if not, on which aspects of culture they may depend – we asked German and Tongan participants to assign prime causality in nine symmetric settings. For most settings, strong asymmetries in both cultures were found, but not always in the same direction, depending on the task content and by virtue of the multifaceted character of “culture.” This indicates that causal asymmetries, while indeed being a robust phenomenon across cultures, are also modulated by task-specific properties (such as figure–ground relations), and are subject to cultural influences.