Lay Beliefs about the Causal Primacy of Mental States: Investigating Universality and Implications

ABSTRACT Humans have both behaviors (“exteriors”) and minds (“interiors”),and this duality underlies folk‐psychology – how we understand ourselves and others. Some cultures emphasize behaviors as causes of outcomes, while others focus on the mind and its mental states. Existing cultural models of agency distinguish causes for behaviors but still treat behaviors as outcomes of mental states. I investigated whether any cultures view behaviors as causing mental states, rather than as an outcome of them. I refer to these as lay beliefs of causal primacy: whether mental states are perceived as a cause of behaviors or vice versa. In Study 1 (N =2039) and Study 2 (N = 967), I used a binary scale to measure these beliefs across cultures. Results showed that participants generally believed mental states are causally primary to behaviors, though the strength of this belief varied significantly between samples. This variation was inconsistent across mental state types (thoughts vs. emotions) and proposition types (descriptive vs. prescriptive). Building on these findings, we conducted Study 3 (N = 795) and Study 4 (N = 1025), using a continuous scale to measure causal primacy beliefs and examine their implications. These studies revealed that cultural differences identified in Studies 1 and 2 were smaller and less robust than initially suggested, complicating investigations into the implications of causal primacy beliefs. Overall, our results indicate a possible cultural universality in attributing causal primacy to mental states over behaviors, though further research is needed to confirm this.