IMPLICIT CAUSALITY AS IMPLICIT SALIENCE

In past research, Ss attributed interpersonal actions more to agents t han to patients and interpersonal experiences more to stimuli than to experiencers. For example, in the sentences ''A cheats B'' and ''A sho cks B,'' the act of cheating and the experience of shock were attribut ed more to A than to B. These and related findings are explained in te rms of salience, In Study 1, people reading simple 3rd-person sentence s judged agents to be more salient than patients and stimuli to be mor e salient than experiencers. In Study 2, the usual pattern of attribut ing actions primarily to agents and experiences primarily to stimuli w as eliminated by manipulating sentence form so that the reader was dep icted as actor rather than observer. In Study 3, sentences describing accidental collisions between inanimate entities implied greater salie nce and causality of agents than patients.