FSS-DSOC Luncheon Seminar 2025 Fall #2 & Mini-Methods Meeting (M3)

Causal explanations are a key component of human cognition. While we possess certain causal models of the world that offer satisfactory explanations for a range of phenomena, our cognitive capacities have their limits when dealing with the complexities of the world, leaving the causes of many events elusive. In this talk, I integrate ethnographic and historical evidence to show that, despite our limited understanding of why certain events occur, people throughout human history and across diverse societies have seldom invoked “chance”—a concept that has gained significant importance in contemporary, modern societies—as an explanation. Instead, they frequently propose putative causal relationships or posit intermediary entities such as “luck” to account for why specific events unfold within their particular spatial–temporal contexts. I discuss the psychological, cognitive, and cultural evolutionary factors that hinder the development of chance-based explanations and argue that the conceptualization of chance as something measurable and its subsequent acceptance as a legitimate explanation emerged relatively late in human history, marking a pivotal intellectual shift with profound implications on how we perceive and manage uncertainty in our daily lives.