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ABSTRACT
Recent research has suggested that humans have a robust tendency to default to teleological (i.e., purpose-based) explanations of natural phenomena. However, because samples have previously been heavily drawn from Western cultures, it is unclear whether this is a universal cognitive bias or whether prior findings are a product of Western philosophical and theological traditions. We evaluated these possibilities by administering a speeded judgment task to adults in China – a country that underwent nearly 40 years of institutionally enforced atheism in the Maoist era and which has markedly different cultural beliefs than those found in Western societies. Results indicated that Chinese adults, like Western adults, have a propensity to favor scientifically unwarranted teleological explanations under processing constraints. However, results also yielded suggestive evidence that Chinese culture may attenuate baseline tendencies to be teleological. Overall, this study provides the strongest evidence to date of the cross-cultural robustness of a teleological explanatory bias.
Acknowledgments
We thank Justin Barrett, Marian Chen, Laure Saint Georges, Ted Slingerland, and Rob Weller, as well as Rich Sosis and an anonymous reviewer, for their invaluable advice and assistance. We also thank Natalie Emmons, Elisa Järnefelt, and Adena Schachner for helpful feedback on a draft of this manuscript. We are especially grateful to our translators: Fang Hong, Jonathan Leu, Chen Shen, Kelly Wei, Wan Wei, Justin Winslet, Sophie Wu, and Liang Xu.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Joshua Rottman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2284-1428
Notes
1. While Chinese religions such as Buddhism and Daoism are allegedly non-theistic, China has had and continues to have a substantial number of theistic believers (Lagerway & Kalinowski, Citation2011). Though religious beliefs and practices were dramatically affected under communism, recent decades have seen a marked increase in religious practice, much of it – even among Buddhists and Daoists – theistic (Yang, Citation2011). Furthermore, recent analyses of ancient texts suggest that both anthropomorphic theism and mind–body dualism have ancient roots in the literary culture (e.g., Clark & Winslett, Citation2011; Slingerland & Chudek, Citation2011).
2. This is not an exhaustive list; for example, the recent influences of post-Enlightenment thought (e.g., positivism, Marxism) have also been considerable.
3. The data were also reanalyzed after omitting 11 participants due to low (60%–80%) accuracy on control items, based on exclusion criteria from prior research that were designed to eliminate individuals who were unable to accurately read and respond to the stimuli under speeded conditions (see Kelemen et al., Citation2013). The pattern of results remained the same.
4. These questions were embedded within another 11 questions about scientific beliefs that were not analyzed and will not be discussed further.
5. For instance, a comparison to the undergraduate sample in Kelemen et al. (Citation2013) demonstrates that the present Chinese sample is markedly less teleological, t(333) = 5.72, p < .001, d = 0.67.