Predicting the causal agent in verbally described social interactions

Implicit causality in interpersonal verbs (i.e., causal assumptions about the initiator of a social interaction) has been extensively investigated, especially in English and German language (cf. Rudolph & Försterling, 1997). The present study is the first to investigate verb causality in Danish language using a student sample (N = 96) while simultaneously examining consensus (i.e., to what extent others besides the grammatical subject treat the object like this) and distinctiveness (i.e., to what extent solely the object person is treated by the subject like this) as predictors of causal attribution to subject or object. A strong verb causality effect in Danish language emerged. Consensus proved to be a better predictor than distinctiveness for causal attribution