THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSALITY IMPLICIT IN VERBS - A REVIEW

The authors comprehensively review research and theory on the verb cau sality effect. The effect involves the finding that different types of verbs used to describe interpersonal events give rise to different as sumptions about the causes of the respective event. The authors analyz e and conceptualize the linguistic categories that serve as independen t variables in the pertinent studies, describe the research methods us ed, conduct reanalyses on the published data, and summarize the result s. They conclude that the verb causality effect constitutes a robust a nd strong finding that has been documented by several independent rese archers across different verb samples, cultures, languages, and age gr oups. Furthermore, they present and discuss the theoretical explanatio ns for the phenomenon and argue that it can be explained parsimoniousl y by basic attribution mechanisms (i.e., perceived covariation informa tion).