Covariation and quantifier polarity: What determines causal attribution in vignettes?

Abstract

Tests of causal attribution often use verbal vignettes, with covariation information provided through statements quantified with natural language expressions. The effect of covariation information has typically been taken to show that set size information affects attribution. However, recent research shows that quantifiers provide information about discourse focus as well as covariation information. In the attribution literature, quantifiers are used to depict covariation, but they confound quantity and focus. In four experiments, we show that focus explains all (Experiment 1) or some (Experiments 2-4) of the impact of covariation information on the attributions made, confirming the importance of the confound. Attribution experiments using vignettes that present covariation information with natural language quantifiers may overestimate the impact of set size information, and ignore the impact of quantifier-induced focus. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Keywords: Attribution theory; Causal reasoning; Covariation; Quantifiers Den divorced Angie, Maureen loves Billy, Ian hates Phil-but why? Making causal attributions about social situations is a core part of every day human cognition. A prominent idea about how people make causal attributions is that they use covariation information, the observed co-occurrence of two events (Kelley, 1967). More recently, covariation theory in its many guises assumes that people are exposed to instances of

To do or not to do? A cognitive consistency model for drawing conclusions from conditional instructions and advice

“…This raises important questions for theories of language and reasoning, as only the consistency theory is able to explain why people will draw a positive conclusion in one case and a negative conclusion in another case, even though both cases appear to convey the same expected utility of doing the consequent given the antecedent. Our results complement findings on causal explanation which demonstrate the operation of polarity (Majid, Sanford, & Pickering, 2006) and balance (Brown & van Kleeck, 1989;Rudolph & von Hecker, 2006), suggesting that the consistency approach can provide general organising principles to subsume a range of linguistic and world knowledge effects in reasoning.…”

Time and Causation in Discourse: Temporal Proximity, Implicit Causality, and Re-mention Biases

“…Finally, our findings also have implications for the debate (Hartshorne 2014) about whether implicit causality biases are based on linguistic structure (Brown and Fish 1983;Crinean and Garnham 2006;Hartshorne and Snedeker 2013, inter alia) or are a function of higher-level, extra-linguistic event cognition (LaFrance et al 1997;Majid et al 2006;Pickering and Majid 2007, inter alia). The linguistic structure account places heavy importance on the correlations of both argument structure (Hartshorne and Snedeker 2013;Hartshorne 2014) and discourse structure (Kehler et al 2008;Bott and Solstad 2014) on implicit causality and re-mention biases.…”

“…This debate prompted a series of studies showing that aside from verb-level argument structure (Brown and Fish 1983;Hartshorne and Snedeker 2013), various factors (both linguistic and extra-linguistic) can modulate the implicit causality bias, including the negativity of its connotative meaning (Semin and Marsman 1994), the gender and typicality of participants (LaFrance et al 1997;Corrigan 1992), quantifier-induced focus (Majid et al 2006), as well as the availability of explanations in context (Bott and Solstad 2013). Taken together, these studies support the view that the implicit causality bias is due to information coming from multiple dimensions, both at the level of the verb, as well as in discourse.…”

What are implicit causality and consequentiality?

“…In addition, properties of the participants affect implicit causality. Changing the gender (Lafrance, Brownell, & Hahn, 1997), animacy (Corrigan, 1988(Corrigan, , 1992, or typicality (Corrigan, 1992;Garvey et al, 1976) of the participants changes the implicit-causality bias, as do contextual factors that affect focus (Majid, Sanford, & Pickering, 2006). Finally, syntactic form is important, with causal attribution differing for active versus passive constructions (Au, 1986;Garvey et al, 1976;Kasof & Lee, 1994).…”