抄録
Studies about cross-cultural psychology have demonstrated that East Asians make relatively broader and more complex causal attributions than Westerners. For instance, Korean participants indicated a greater number of causes could contribute to the event than Americans (Choi et al., 2003). Present study tested whether East Asians make broader cognition in reasoning about causal conditional “if A then B”. We hypothesized that East Asians may consider the possibility of precondition A (“does A happens or not”) as well as the possibility of “A causes B”. In the two on-line experiments, we recruited Americans and Japanese participants and presented eight causal conditionals, which manipulated the probability of A happens. Participants judged the probability at which a causal conditional is true or false. Japanese participants estimated conditional was true when the probability of Awas high, while Americans did not. These results indicated that Easterners might make broader cognition in causal conditional reasoning.
