Who dun it? The influence of actor-patient animacy and type of verb in the making of causal attributions

Corrigan, Roberta

doi:10.1016/0749-596x(88)90067-8

Cited by 41 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…That part of the event which is abnormal is usually viewed as the cause of the event. Consistent with this finding, Corrigan (1988) found that inanimate actors (usually atypical) were cited as causal regardless of verb class. Knowledge about the normal case is often based upon the world knowledge of the participant rather than upon information that is provided in the experiment (Hilton, Smith & Alicke, 1988).…”

Section: Relationships Between Event Typicality and Causal Attributionsupporting

confidence: 74%

“…Sentences such as the second one contain action verbs that describe one person acting upon another. Brown and his colleagues claim that action verbs always elicit causal attributions to the sentence actor (but see Corrigan, 1988, for exceptions). They speculate that the causal schemas underlying the attributions to these two sets of verbs are universals of human thought and support this contention with data from Chinese and Japanese speakers whose languages are structured in ways very dissimilar from English (Brown, 1986;Brown & Fish, 19836).…”

Section: Event Typicalitymentioning

confidence: 96%

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

Corrigan

1992

British J Social Psychol

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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.

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Section: Relationships Between Event Typicality and Causal Attributionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Section: Event Typicalitymentioning

confidence: 96%

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

Corrigan

1992

British J Social Psychol

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“…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).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What are implicit causality and consequentiality?

Pickering

Majid

2007

Language and Cognitive Processes

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“…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.…”

Section: Do People Go Beyond the Information Given?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Majid

Sanford

Pickering

2007

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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There is little consensus regarding the circumstances in which people spontaneously generate causal inferences, and in particular whether they generate inferences about the causal antecedents or the causal consequences of events. We tested whether people systematically infer causal antecedents or causal consequences to minimal social scenarios by using a continuation methodology. People overwhelmingly produced causal antecedent continuations for descriptions of interpersonal events (John hugged Mary), but causal consequence continuations to descriptions of transfer events (John gave a book to Mary). This demonstrates that there is no global cognitive style, but rather inference generation is crucially tied to the input. Further studies examined the role of event unusualness, number of participators, and verb-type on the likelihood of producing a causal antecedent or causal consequence inference. We conclude that inferences are critically guided by the speciWc verb used.

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Who dun it? The influence of actor-patient animacy and type of verb in the making of causal attributions

Cited by 41 publications

References 7 publications

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

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

What are implicit causality and consequentiality?

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

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