Conditional promises and threats are speech acts that aim at changing another person's behavior according to one's own goals. They combine several components on different levels: goals and incentives/penalties on the motivational level, formulations on the linguistic level, obligations on the deontic level, action sequences on the behavioral level, and affective responses on the emotional level. In a cross-cultural study – comparing Germany, China, and the Kingdom of Tonga – we examined the extent to which the cognitive understanding of conditional (...) promises and threats on the various levels is shared across cultures. The results support conceptual universality, but also show that the different components are specifically affected by cultural conventions and values that shape communication styles, moral rules, and attribution tendencies. (shrink)

As social beings, people need to be able to interact intelligently with others in their social environment. Accordingly, people spend much time conversing with one another in order to understand the broad and fine aspects of the relations that link them. They are especially interested in the interactive behaviors that constitute social relations, such as mutual aid, gift giving and exchange, sharing, informal socializing, or deception. The evaluations of these behaviors are embedded in social relationships and charged with values and (...) emotions. We developed tasks to probe how people in an unfamiliar socio-cultural setting understand and account for the behavior of others conditional upon their category membership – by trying to elicit the basic categories, stereotypes, and models that inform the causal perceptions, inferences and reasoning people use in understanding others’ interactive behaviors – and we tested these tasks among the Wampar in Papua New Guinea. The results show changes in the relevance of social categories among the Wampar but also, and perhaps more important, limitations in the translation and applicability of cognitive tasks. (shrink)

Cross-cultural differences in cognition are often related to one single cultural dimension. Whether this suffices even for simple tasks is examined in the context of causal attribution. Culture-specific attribution biases are well-established for the social domain, but under dispute for the physical domain. In order to identify and assess possible impacts on assigning physical causation, we conducted a cross-cultural experiment with participants from Germany, China and Tonga. Participants were required to identify which of two entities is the ultimate cause for (...) a physical interaction that was varied with regard to linguistic cues and content. Our data reveal overall cultural differences in attribution tendencies analogous to those in the social domain, but also an impact of linguistic cues and of the task-specific content. (shrink)