On the link between phenomenal causality and personality dominance

摘要

The present study investigated whether personality dominance is related to phenomenal causality. Recently, renewed attention has been given to dispositional theories, suggesting that the causal impression arises because people interpret collisions in terms of antagonistic action roles. Here, we examined the relation between personality dominance and the judgment of causality of ambiguous patterns of motion. The results revealed that dominance as a trait is associated with an increased tendency to infer causality in ambiguous displays. We found that participants with high dominance scores (measured by means of a questionnaire) gave significantly more causal judgments than participants with low dominance scores. Our findings highlight that people's understanding of causality is grounded in their experiences of action.