The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in ...Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.
The Blame Game Knobloch-Westerwick, Silvia; Taylor, Laramie D.
Communication research,
12/2008, Letnik:
35, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
“Blame game” coverage relates to news about actors in the public arena as they try to deflect, deflate, or diffuse blame for negative events so that the public does not view them as the cause of ...harm. The current research looks at formal differences in news presentations and how they affect causal attributions of news readers and subsequent support for agents in the news and policy preferences. In Study 1, verb voice was manipulated in four news stories with one key agent; when active voice was used to describe actions relative to an event, that agent was more seen as the cause of that event than when passive voice was used. Study 2 demonstrated, based on three news reports about conflicts, that facets of causal attributions—perceived control and intention— affect perceptions of agents' traits, as well as assent and support for the changes targeted by the news agents.
Double Standards in Sentence Structure Frazer, Alexandra K.; Miller, Michelle D.
Journal of language and social psychology,
03/2009, Letnik:
28, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Previous research has shown that passive voice predominates in mass media reports describing male violence against women. However, there has been little systematic study of narratives describing ...female violence against men. The authors analyzed the impact of perpetrator gender on verb voice, first in a content analysis of published news stories and second in a new procedure for eliciting written narratives with male or female perpetrators. Results reveal an increased frequency of passive voice when perpetrators are male. These findings suggest that writers specifically prefer the passive voice to describe male-on-female violence rather than for violent or negative acts in general.
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