Across most of history and most societies, people almost never explained events as pure chance, argues a cross-cultural review. They reached for hidden causes, spirits or luck instead.
Ze Hong of the University of Macau first posted “Chance as a (non)explanation: A cross-cultural examination of folk understanding of chance and coincidence” as a preprint on January 3, 2024. The paper was published in Psychological Review in April 2026.
Witchcraft, ancestors and luck
Hong combines ethnographic and historical evidence. In ethnographic writing, chance is often mentioned only to note its absence: “Zulu thought-patterns do not allow for chance,” one account reads, and another found chance “not germane to Saramaka thought.”
The classic case comes from the Azande, described by Evans-Pritchard in 1937. They knew termites had undermined a granary and that people sat beneath it to escape the sun, but the fact that it collapsed at the very moment those people were there was put down to witchcraft.
Horton described the same logic in traditional African cultures: when a rotten branch falls and kills a man, the cause is sought in a quarrel over an inheritance and a sorcerer, or in angry lineage ancestors.
Where people did acknowledge uncertainty, they often posited a luck-like quality attached to a person, which could be gained or lost and was sometimes linked to ancestral spirits. Hong argues luck is more appealing than chance because it is substantive, emotionally meaningful and offers rituals that promise some control.
Why chance came late
Hong points to deterministic thinking, holistic worldviews that tie social, natural and spiritual events together, and the cultural transmission of non-chance explanations. Even today, about 85% of respondents in one cited survey regarded coincidences as meaningful.
Cross-cultural researchers also often struggle to translate the modern English concept of chance into other languages.
Chance as something measurable, he argues, became a legitimate explanation only relatively late in history, with the development of probability theory. Modern life supplies everyday systems with built-in uncertainty, such as weather forecasts, sports predictions and political polling, that make chance feel familiar.
He also flags a cost. Once an event is attributed to chance, the search for deeper causes often stops. Volcanic eruptions moved from chance to mechanism as volcanology advanced, while earthquakes are still largely treated as random.
Study Details:
- Title: Chance as a (non)explanation: A cross-cultural examination of folk understanding of chance and coincidence
- Authors: Ze Hong
- Journal: Psychological Review
- Publication Date: April 2026
- DOI: 10.1037/rev0000568