Agents and Patients in Physical Settings: Linguistic Cues Affect the Assignment of Causality in German and Tongan

What Is Causal Cognition?

While gaining an understanding of cause-effect relations is the key goal of causal cognition, its components are less clearly delineated. Standard approaches in the field focus on how individuals detect, learn, and reason from statistical regularities, thereby prioritizing cognitive processes over content and context. This article calls for a broadened perspective. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of what is going on when humans engage in causal cognition—including its application to machine cognition—it is argued, we also need to take into account the content that informs the processing, the means and mechanisms of knowledge accumulation and transmission, and the cultural context in which both accumulation and transmission take place.

Persuasive Effects of Linguistic Agency Assignment and Linguistic Markers of Argumentation in Health Messages about an Emerging Sexually Transmitted Disease

Answering the call by some health communication researchers to give greater attention to message strategies at the level of word choices and sentence structures, this study examined how the linguistic marking of argumentative orientation and linguistic agency assignment affects young adults' reactions to an informational message about a sexually transmitted infection presented as a new emerging health threat. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of the four versions of a fact sheet defined by a 2 × 2 (agency assignment x marking of argumentation orientation) factorial design and thereafter completed a questionnaire. Results indicated that the assignment of agency to the virus (vs. human) increased the perceived severity of the health threat, perceived susceptibility to it, persuasiveness of the message, and safer sex intentions. The same outcomes occurred when the message was phrased with a high marking of the argumentative orientation rather than a low marking. These findings suggest that a better understanding of language variable effects can boost the efficacy of promotional health messages.

The Cultural Fabric of Human Causal Cognition

Causal cognition emerges early in development and confers an important advantage for survival. But does this mean that it is universal in humans? Our cross-disciplinary review suggests a broad evolutionary basis for core components of causal cognition but also underlines the essential role of culturally transmitted content as being uniquely human. The multiple ways in which both content and the key mechanisms of cultural transmission generate cultural diversity suggest that causal cognition in humans is not only colored by their specific cultural background but also shaped more fundamentally by the very fact that humans are a cultural species.