Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Fundamental theories of causal cognition suggest that causal inferences are guided by domain-specific knowledge inaddition to domain-general strategies used to draw causal conclusions. In particular, a divide seems to exist betweencausal judgments on physical versus psychological events. In line with these assumptions, domain-specific expectationsof causal patterns have been observed for psychological and physical events in a US-American context. The present studyintended to augment these findings by integrating (a) a cross-cultural perspective and by including (b) biological events aspart of an additional domain. Results replicated previous findings of domain-specific causal expectations in German andTurkish cultural contexts, but at the same time they indicated causal expectations for the biological domain to be partiallyless distinct.