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.