The relationship between causal attributions and judgements of the typicality of events described by sentences

Abstract

Three experiments examined the influence of causal attributions on people's judgements of what is a typical event, as reflected in their judgements of what is a typical sentence. In Expt 1, college students judged the typicality of an event depicted by a sentence. In Expt 2, students judged which of two participants caused the action or state depicted in a sentence. In both experiments, the animacy of the participants interacted with different classes of action or experiencer verbs in similar ways to influence prototypicality judgements or causal attributions. There was a positive correlation between the degree of causality attributed to an event participant and the perceived typicality of the event. In Expt 3, students judged the prototypicality of the same sentences after they read an antecedent sentence that emphasized either the target sentence subject or object as causal agent. Manipulating the attribution of causality in this way influenced judgements of prototypicality, even though causal judgements were not explicitly demanded in the experiment. A particular type of world knowledge, causal knowledge about who does what to whom, seems to be particularly influential in our understanding of the sentence events described in this research. Even without context, causal attributions influence our view of the typicality of an event. With an appropriate context, the influence is accentuated.

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).…”

Time and Causation in Discourse: Temporal Proximity, 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.…”

The linguistic description of minimal social scenarios affects the extent of causal inference making

“…In contrast, a fragment such as John praised Mary becauseƒ typically leads participants to continue with a reference to Mary, because they likely assume that Mary has done something praiseworthy. A considerable literature has catalogued this implicit causality bias (e.g., Au, 1986;Brown & Fish, 1983;Corrigan, 1988Corrigan, , 1992Garvey & Caramazza, 1974). Such studies assume that interpersonal verbs invite spontaneous causal attribution.…”