What is implicit causality?

In causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrast Sally frightens Mary because she … with Sally loves Mary because she …). This “implicit causality” phenomenon is understood to reflect intuitions about who caused the event. Researchers have debated whether these intuitions are based on linguistic structure or instead a function of high-level, non-linguistic cognition. Two lines of evidence support the latter conclusion: implicit causality is related to a broad social judgement task, and it is affected by general knowledge about the participants in the event. On closer inspection, neither of these claims have been established. Eight new experiments find that (a) the relationship between implicit causality and the social judgement task is tenuous, and (b) previously employed event-participant manipulations have minimal to no effect on implicit causality. These findings support an account on which implicit causality is driven primarily by linguistic structure and only minimally by general knowledge and non-linguistic cognition.

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