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Moral judgment often involves pinning causation for harm toa particular person. Since it reveals “who one sides with”, ex-pression of moral judgment can be a costly social act that peo-ple may be motivated to conceal. Here, we demonstrate thata simple, well-studied psycholinguistic task (implicit causal-ity) can be leveraged as a novel implicit measure of morallyrelevant causal attributions. Participants decided whether tocontinue sentences like “Amy killed Bob because...” with ei-ther the pronoun he or she. We found that (1) implicit causal-ity selections predicted explicit causal judgments, (2) select-ing the object (victim) for harm/force events (e.g., kill, rape)predicted endorsement of moral values previously linked tovictim-blame, and (3) higher hostile sexism predicted select-ing the female as the cause in male-on-female harm/force. Theimplicit causality task is a new measure of morally motivatedcausal attribution that may circumvent social desirability con-cerns.

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form "SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because..." where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows "because"—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the referent of a nonreflexive pronoun clearly depends on context, the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. The present study seeks to characterise one representation that guides pronoun resolution. Our focus is an effect known as “implicit causality”. In causal dependant clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrastSally frightened Mary because she …withSally feared Mary because she…). A number of researchers have tried to explain and predict such biases with reference to semantic classes of verbs. However, such studies have focused on a small number of specially selected verbs. In Experiment 1, we find that existing taxonomies perform near chance at predicting pronoun-resolution bias on a large set of representative verbs. However, a more fine-grained taxonomy recently proposed in the linguistics literature does significantly better. In Experiment 2, we tested all 264 verbs in two of the narrowly defined verb classes from this new taxonomy, finding that pronoun-resolution biases were categorically different. These findings suggest that the semantic structure of verbs tightly constrains the interpretation of pronouns in causal sentences, raising challenges for theories which posit that implicit causality biases reflect world knowledge or arbitrary lexical features. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female superiority in aspects of lexical memory. Other neurocognitive models of language have not made this prediction. Here we examine the prediction in past-tense over-regularizations (e.g. holded ) produced by children. We expected that girls would remember irregular past-tense forms (held ) better than boys, and thus would over-regularize less. To our surprise, girls over-regularized far more than boys. We investigated potential explanations for this sex difference. Analyses showed that in girls but not boys, over-regularization rates correlated with measures of the number of similar-sounding regulars (folded, molded ). This sex difference in phonological neighborhood effects is taken to suggest that girls tend to produce over-regularizations in associative lexical memory, generalizing over stored neighboring regulars, while boys are more likely to depend upon rule-governed affixation (hold +-ed ). The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that, likely due to their superior lexical abilities, females tend to retrieve from memory complex forms (walked ) that men generally compose with the grammatical system (walk +-ed ). The results suggest that sex may be an important factor in the acquisition and computation of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]