No privileged link between intentionality and causation: Generalizable effects of agency in language

Abstract

People are more inclined to agree with certain causal statements when a person acts intentionally than when a person acts unintentionally or without agency. Most existing research has assumed that this effect is to be explained in terms of the operation of people's causal cognition. We propose a different explanation which involves a linguistic phenomenon involving the impact of agency on people's judgments about a broader class of sentences, including non-causal sentences. Study 1 shows that the effect arises for both causal and non-causal sentences. The remaining studies show that the effect arises only when the subject of the sentence is animate (Study 2), that the effect arises both for outcomes with negative valence and outcomes with neutral valence (Study 3) and that the effect is driven by whether or not a person exercises agentive control over her body, rather than whether or not she intends the particular outcome of her action (Study 4). We conclude with a formal linguistic theory that captures these effects.