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{
    "pk": 29921,
    "title": "The Plausible Impossible: Graded Notions of Impossibility Across Cultures",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition,\nimpossible, but recent research suggests that people view some\nviolations as “more impossible” than others (Shtulman &\nMorgan, 2017). When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells,\nAmerican adults are influenced by seemingly irrelevant\nconsiderations, judging, for instance, that it would be more\ndifficult to levitate a bowling ball than a basketball even\nthough weight should no longer be a consideration if contact is\nno longer necessary for support. Here, we explore these effects\nin a non-Western context—China—where magical events are\nrepresented differently in fiction and reasoning styles are often\nmore holistic than analytic. Across several studies, Chinese\nadults showed the same tendency as American adults to honor\nimplicit causal constraints when evaluating the plausibility of\nmagical events. These findings suggest that graded notions of\nimpossibility are shared across cultures, possibly because they\nare a byproduct of causal knowledge.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "causal reasoning; magical reasoning; naive\ntheories; fiction; imagination"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Poster Session 3",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56m6v3nh",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Tianwei",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Gong",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Beijing Normal University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Andrew",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Shtulman",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Occidental College",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2020-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29921/galley/19775/download/"
        }
    ]
}