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Is agency a straightforward and universal feature of human experience? Or is the construction of agency (including attention to and memory for people involved in events) guided by patterns in culture? In this paper we focus on one aspect of cultural experience: patterns in language. We examined English and Japanese speakers’ descriptions of intentional and accidental events. English and Japanese speakers described intentional events similarly, using mostly agentive language (e.g., “She broke the vase”). However, when it came to accidental events English speakers used more agentive language than did Japanese speakers. We then tested whether these different patterns found in language may also manifest in cross-cultural differences in attention and memory. Results from a non-linguistic memory task showed that English and Japanese speakers remembered the agents of intentional events equally well. However, English speakers remembered the agents of accidents better than did Japanese speakers, as predicted from patterns in language. Further, directly manipulating agency in language during another laboratory task changed people’s eye-witness memory, confirming a possible causal role for language. Patterns in one’s linguistic environment may promote and support how people instantiate agency in context.

Introduction

Throughout life, we act on the world around us. We move and shake things, we build and break things. And we make many inferences about actions and outcomes, deciding who to blame for what. Mundane, everyday life may lead us to think that causal agency is a natural, straightforward, and universal feature of human experience. Is it?

Consider this scenario: A forklift operator is maneuvering his heavy load toward its destination in a crowded warehouse, and as he squeezes around a tight turn, the nearest shelf collapses and millions of dollars worth of fine crystal comes crashing to the floor. Was the operator, the tight turn, the rickety shelf, or the fragile crystal the cause? Was collapsing, falling, or shattering the effect?

Previous work in the psychology of agency has revealed that “causal agent” is a context-dependent construct, with both physical and social context playing important roles. For example, in visual cognition, the perception of physical causality is easily altered by minor changes in context. In one set of studies, Scholl and Nakayama (2002) showed people videos of an event that could be seen either as a ball knocking into another ball thereby launching it into motion (a launch) or as a ball passing another stationary ball (a pass). They discovered that the visual context in which people perceived this ambiguous event mattered. When paired with even a momentary glimpse of another launch event in the visual environment, the event now looked like a clear launch. That is, whether a moving object is seen as a causal agent – in the identical physical presentation – depends on the surrounding visual context.

Social context also plays an important role. Societies across the world instantiate different concepts of the self, with East Asian societies emphasizing interdependent ways of being and Western societies emphasizing more independent notions of self (e.g., Markus and Kitayama, 1991, 2004). Compared to people in interdependent societies, people in independent societies are more likely to select a single proximal cause for an event (e.g., Chiu et al., 2000; Choi et al., 2003), are less aware of distal consequences of events (e.g., Maddux and Yuki, 2006), are more susceptible to correspondence bias (e.g., Choi et al., 1999), and are more motivated by personal choice (e.g., Iyengar and Lepper, 1999). The role that individuals play in events may depend on notions of agency that are culture-specific (e.g., Morris et al., 2001). What it means to be an “agent” does not appear to be a stable, universal property of events in the world. What people see and believe to be an agent is constructed in context.

In this paper we ask whether habitual patterns of speaking in one's linguistic community, as well as patterns in one's immediate linguistic context, might also be included among the set of cues for constructing notions of agency. In particular, we examine the role of language in shaping attention to and memory for individuals involved in events (potential agents).

In language, one finds pervasive and systematic ways of construing and interpreting the world. Patterns in everyday descriptions (e.g., whether someone says “He shattered the crystal” or “The crystal shattered”) may serve as pervasive and powerful cues to agency. Previous work has demonstrated that such differences in linguistic framing can indeed serve as cues to agency and carry serious consequences for how much we blame and punish others (Fausey and Boroditsky, in press a). For example, English speakers who read a report about Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction containing the agentive expression “tore the bodice” not only blamed Timberlake more, but also levied 53% more in fines for the offense than those who read the non-agentive “the bodice tore.” The linguistic framing had a big effect on blame and punishment even when people watched a video of the event and were able to witness the tearing with their own eyes. In this paper, we explore the role of such patterns in language in shaping attention to and memory for individuals involved in events.

A role for language? We talk about the events of our days, often discussing who did what to whom. We talk to our children, we update our bosses, we negotiate with friends and colleagues. We learn from other people's stories. A huge proportion of what we know about the world comes to us through the medium of language. Human language use is exquisitely structured and systematic, and as a result our conversations carry many regularities in how we communicate “what happened.” Could patterns in language help shape whether we construe someone as being the agent of an event and whether we attend to and remember who was involved? The influence of language on cognition and behavior has been demonstrated in many domains. For example, linguistic framing or labeling changes how people perceive emotion (e.g., Barrett et al., 2007), represent objects (e.g., Lupyan, 2008) and remember events (e.g., Loftus and Palmer, 1974; Gentner and Loftus, 1979; Billman and Krych, 1998). Further, people are sensitive to how often certain expressions are used within their linguistic community (Saffran et al., 1996; Landauer and Dumais, 1997; Gahl and Garnsey, 2004) and speakers of different languages talk about events differently (e.g., Gentner and Goldin-Meadow, 2003). Language directs attention (e.g., Reali et al., 2006; Richardson and Matlock, 2007) and through repeated use may guide habitual event construals (e.g., Slobin, 1996). Indeed, research in the tradition of linguistic relativity has suggested that habitual ways of talking influence how people think about colors (e.g., Roberson and Hanley, 2007; Winawer et al., 2007), space (e.g., Levinson et al., 2002), objects (e.g., Lucy, 1992; Imai and Gentner, 1997; Boroditsky et al., 2003; Dilkina et al., 2007) and events (Slobin, 1996, 2003; Finkbeiner et al., 2002; Gennari et al., 2002; Oh, 2003; Papafragou et al., 2008; Wolff et al., 2009; Trueswell and Papafragou, 2010). Could language also play a role in how people construct agency and attend to and remember the potential agents of events? In this paper, we identify cross-linguistic differences in how English and Japanese speakers describe the same events, and find that there are corresponding cross-linguistic differences in eye-witness memory.

Agentivity in language You see someone accidentally brush against a flower vase and the vase ends up in pieces on the floor. When asked about what happened, you might say, “She broke the vase.” In English, agentive descriptions like this are typical and appropriate even for clearly accidental events. By contrast, non-agentive language often sounds evasive (e.g., Reagan's famous “mistakes were made” in the 1987 State of the Union Address). Linguistic analyses suggest that in other languages, non-agentive expressions are more frequent and are used to distinguish accidental from intentional actions (Slobin and Bocaz, 1988; Maldonado, 1992; Martinez, 2000; Dorfman, 2004; Filipovic, 2007). For example, some analyses have suggested that the frequency of non-agentive expressions may be higher in Japanese than in English (e.g., Teramura, 1976; Choi, 2009). In Japanese, two different verbs are often used for the transitive and intransitive description of the same action. These two verbs often share the same stem. One example is waru/wareru (to break). An agentive use would be (Tamago-wo watta/(I) broke (the) egg). A non-agentive use would be (Tamago-ga wareta/(The) egg broke). Other verbs in Japanese have the same form for both transitive and intransitive uses, and the presence of the particle “ga” attached to the affected object marks the non-agentive expression. One example is hiraku (to open). An agentive use would be (Kare-ga DOA-wo hiraita/He opened (the) door) and a non-agentive use would be (DOA-ga hiraita/(The) door opened). Verbs are thought to be especially salient in Japanese and typical verb forms in Japanese may differ from typical verb forms in English. For example, Teramura (1976) noted that even when an event involves someone who could be described as a causal agent (e.g., “He dropped the pen”), it is often more natural in Japanese to describe such events using non-agentive expressions like “PEN-ga ochiteshimatta” (“(The) pen dropped, unfortunately”), or even sentences that include only a verb like “ochiteshimatta” (“dropped, unfortunately”). Also, when describing certain kinds of causal events (such as when there is a delay between the cause and outcome, or when an agent is not visually depicted but may be inferred), Japanese speakers are less likely to use transitive expressions compared to speakers of other languages (Bohnemeyer et al., 2010; Choi, 2009). Further, evidence from patterns of language acquisition suggests that early verb use in English may be more transitive than early verb use in Japanese, likely due to different adult input (e.g., Nomura and Shirai, 1997; Fukuda, 2005; Tsujimura, 2006). Verbs may be especially salient in Japanese because nouns and pronouns in Japanese are often optional and inferred from context (e.g., Fernald and Morikawa, 1993). The form of the verb may therefore be a potent cue for how to frame an event. Might such differences in event descriptions lead people to construe and remember causal events differently?