Rudolph U, Försterling F
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Z Exp Psychol. 1997;44(2):293-304.
Studies dealing with the implicit causality in verbs have shown that even minimal descriptions of interpersonal events (e.g. "Michael apologizes to Peter" or "Vera admires Karen") systematically elicit attributions toward the sentence subject or sentence object. However, in the majority of existing studies, the stimulus materials (i.e., interpersonal verbs) have not been selected randomly: Verbs were selected either because they had often been used in previous studies, or they were counterbalanced with regard to a number of additional criteria (valence, derivational form, etc.), and therefore, a truly random sampling of stimulus verbs were impossible. In the present study, the criteria for selecting interpersonal verbs are varied in order to compare two groups of verbs, namely, verbs which have been used very often in previous studies versus a random sample of interpersonal verbs. It is shown that the classical findings concerning the perceived causes of interpersonal verbs are less pronounced for the random sample than for the non-random sample of interpersonal verbs. However, even for the random sample of verbs, an impressive amount of variance in causal attributions is explained by different verb types.
关于动词隐含因果关系的研究表明，即使是对人际事件的最简短描述（例如“迈克尔向彼得道歉”或“薇拉钦佩凯伦”）也会系统性地引发对句子主语或宾语的归因。然而，在大多数现有研究中，刺激材料（即人际动词）并非随机选择：动词要么是因为它们在先前研究中经常被使用而被选中，要么是根据一些额外标准（效价、派生形式等）进行平衡，因此，不可能对刺激动词进行真正的随机抽样。在本研究中，选择人际动词的标准有所不同，以便比较两组动词，即先前研究中经常使用的动词与人际动词的随机样本。结果表明，与非随机样本的人际动词相比，关于人际动词感知原因的经典发现对于随机样本来说不那么明显。然而，即使对于动词的随机样本，不同动词类型也解释了相当数量的因果归因差异。
