Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition,
impossible, but recent research suggests that people view some
violations as “more impossible” than others (Shtulman &
Morgan, 2017). When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells,
American adults are influenced by seemingly irrelevant
considerations, judging, for instance, that it would be more
difficult to levitate a bowling ball than a basketball even
though weight should no longer be a consideration if contact is
no longer necessary for support. Here, we explore these effects
in a non-Western context—China—where magical events are
represented differently in fiction and reasoning styles are often
more holistic than analytic. Across several studies, Chinese
adults showed the same tendency as American adults to honor
implicit causal constraints when evaluating the plausibility of
magical events. These findings suggest that graded notions of
impossibility are shared across cultures, possibly because they
are a byproduct of causal knowledge.