Le Guen Olivier, Samland Jana, Friedrich Thomas, Hanus Daniel, Brown Penelope
Linguistics, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social Mexico City, Mexico.
Georg-Elias-Müller-Institute of Psychology, University of Gottingen Gottingen, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2015 Oct 30;6:1645. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01645. eCollection 2015.
In order to make sense of the world, humans tend to see causation almost everywhere. Although most causal relations may seem straightforward, they are not always construed in the same way cross-culturally. In this study, we investigate concepts of "chance," "coincidence," or "randomness" that refer to assumed relations between intention, action, and outcome in situations, and we ask how people from different cultures make sense of such non-law-like connections. Based on a framework proposed by Alicke (2000), we administered a task that aims to be a neutral tool for investigating causal construals cross-culturally and cross-linguistically. Members of four different cultural groups, rural Mayan Yucatec and Tseltal speakers from Mexico and urban students from Mexico and Germany, were presented with a set of scenarios involving various types of causal and non-causal relations and were asked to explain the described events. Three links varied as to whether they were present or not in the scenarios: Intention-to-Action, Action-to-Outcome, and Intention-to-Outcome. Our results show that causality is recognized in all four cultural groups. However, how causality and especially non-law-like relations are interpreted depends on the type of links, the cultural background and the language used. In all three groups, Action-to-Outcome is the decisive link for recognizing causality. Despite the fact that the two Mayan groups share similar cultural backgrounds, they display different ideologies regarding concepts of non-law-like relations. The data suggests that the concept of "chance" is not universal, but seems to be an explanation that only some cultural groups draw on to make sense of specific situations. Of particular importance is the existence of linguistic concepts in each language that trigger ideas of causality in the responses from each cultural group.
为了理解这个世界，人类倾向于几乎在所有地方都看到因果关系。尽管大多数因果关系看似直接明了，但在跨文化背景下，它们的理解方式并不总是相同的。在本研究中，我们调查了“机遇”“巧合”或“随机性”等概念，这些概念涉及情境中意图、行动和结果之间的假定关系，我们还探讨了来自不同文化的人们如何理解这种非规律性的联系。基于艾丽克（2000年）提出的一个框架，我们实施了一项任务，该任务旨在成为一种跨文化和跨语言研究因果解释的中立工具。来自四个不同文化群体的成员，即墨西哥农村的玛雅尤卡特克语和泽尔塔尔语使用者以及来自墨西哥和德国的城市学生，被呈现了一组涉及各种因果和非因果关系类型的情景，并被要求解释所描述的事件。三个联系在情景中是否存在有所不同：意图到行动、行动到结果以及意图到结果。我们的结果表明，所有四个文化群体都能识别因果关系。然而，因果关系尤其是非规律性关系的解释方式取决于联系的类型、文化背景和所使用的语言。在所有三个群体中，行动到结果是识别因果关系的决定性联系。尽管两个玛雅群体有着相似的文化背景，但他们在非规律性关系概念上表现出不同的观念。数据表明，“机遇”概念并非普遍存在，而是似乎只是一些文化群体用来理解特定情境的一种解释。特别重要的是，每种语言中都存在一些语言概念，这些概念在每个文化群体的回答中引发了因果关系的想法。
