Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Across cultures, people use natural and supernatural explanations to explain adverse life events, such as illness or death. Yet little is known about the psychological implications of this type of causal reasoning. Here, we ask, does explanatory coexistence help or hinder coping with significant misfortune? We examined this question through structured interviews with a diverse sample of 147 Los Angelinos who had suffered from severe illness or bereavement during the COVID-19 pandemic. As predicted, mean scores on the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory were significantly higher for participants who employed coexisting explanations for their misfortune than those who employed singular explanations (natural, supernatural) alone. These findings provide evidence of an association between coexistence reasoning about misfortune and positive post-event processing.