{"pk":25675,"title":"Agency concepts across cultures: How intuitive is folkpsychology?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The present research investigates cultural variation in conceptual\nframeworks for interpreting agency. A mind perception\nmeasure (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007) was adapted for interviews\nwith Indigenous Ngöbe adults in Panama and US\ncollege students. Participants ranked the agency capacities of\nvarious entities and provided explanations. Rankings varied\nsystematically, with Ngöbe more likely to ascribe agency to\nnonhuman natural kinds than US participants. Analysis of explanations\nindicated that agency concepts are organized under\ndifferent folktheories: US participants construed agency as a\nhierarchical, prototypically human capacity requiring consciousness,\nwhereas Ngöbe construed agency as a multidimensional\nrelational capacity expressed in directed interactions.\nAn emphasis on psychological agency as distinct from\nother (biological, physical) forms of agency is widely assumed\nto be a conceptual prior, but these findings suggest it\nmay instead be a feature of Western cultural epistemologies","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"agency; folkpsychology; mind perception; culture;\ndomain specificity; animism; Indigenous; Western"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97r007bg","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Bethany","middle_name":"L","last_name":"Ojalehto","name_suffix":"","institution":"Northwestern University","department":""},{"first_name":"Douglas","middle_name":"L","last_name":"Medin","name_suffix":"","institution":"Northwestern University","department":""},{"first_name":"Salino","middle_name":"","last_name":"Garcia","name_suffix":"","institution":"Ngöbe Culture and Language Education Program, Bocas del Toro","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25675/galley/15299/download/"}]}