Social Influences on Implicit Causality and Consequentiality Judgements

Abstract

Interpersonal verbs are semantically rich, conveying information not just about actions or states but about implicit causality, or who is the likely perpetrator of some action or event, and implicit consequentiality, or who is the likely recipient of the action or event. Thus, when encountering a sentence of the form “X verbed Y”, depending on the nature of the verb either the subject or the object is judged to have been responsible for the event in question. This dissertation examined whether, in addition to verb type as a source of attributions of causality and consequentiality, social information about groups judged to have higher or lower social power also affects such attributions. The dissertation tested whether providing clear cues about the gender (Studies 1 and 2) or ethnicity (Studies 3 and 4) of the characters would interact with verb type to affect participants’ judgments. Of additional interest was whether participants’ stereotypes about gender or ethnicity (as measured by their responses on standard instruments) would account for their pattern of performance on the implicit causality and consequentiality tasks. The results showed a robust effect of verb type as a core determinant of attributions of implicit causality and consequentiality, corroborating previous research. In contrast, the effect of gender- or ethnicity-related social information was less clear: when observed, attributions of causality and consequentiality alike were more often applied to characters bearing female than male names and to those bearing names associated with Hispanics than non-Hispanics. It is suggested that this unexpected but consistent finding may be interpreted as a kind of markedness effect making the more marked names (women’s names and Hispanic names) more salient. An alternative explanation may be a social desirability effect. Whatever the nature of gender- and ethnicity-related social information is ultimately shown to be, the present research showed that the semantic structure of interpersonal verbs remains the key determinant in attributions of causality and consequentiality.