Language and causation: A discursive action model of description and attribution.

Edwards, Derek; Potter, Jonathan

doi:10.1037/0033-295x.100.1.23

Cited by 267 publications

(205 citation statements)

References 84 publications

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“…People who tick 'don't know' on attitude or opinion questionnaires are typically treated as uninteresting or a methodological problem to be managed. However, recent work in discursive social psychology has focused specifically on descriptions and factual accounts (Edwards, 1994(Edwards, , 1995Edwards and Potter, 1993;Potter, 1995Potter, , 1996bPotter and Edwards, 1990;Potter and Wetherell, 1988;Potter et al, 1993) and conversation analysts have explored the way neutrality is managed interactionally in particular settings (Clayman, 1992;. I will discuss the conversation analytic work first.…”

Section: Facts and Neutralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Discursive Social Psychology: From Attitudes to Evaluative Practices

Potter

1998

European Review of Social Psychology

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This chapter reviews the major theoretical and methodological features of discursive social psychology, and illustrates the scope and nature of this approach through showing the way it can respecify the social psychology of attitudes. It reviews discourse research on attitude variability; it describes conversation analytic studies on the way evaluations are managed in interaction and shows how our understanding of political oratory can be improved; it discusses the way evaluations are bound up with broader, culturally defined, systems of discourse; it discusses the relation between assessments and factual accounts; and finally it shows how a discursive approach can rework notions of function, consistency, vested interest, and emotion.The aim of this chapter is to introduce a discursive approach to social psychology to people who are more familiar with the mainstream experimental social cognition tradition.After making some preliminary remarks about the history, aims and theory of discursive social psychology I will focus on what would traditionally be called the social psychology of attitudes. This topic has the virtue of being at the heart of social psychology for much of the century, and thus provides a familiar startpoint for anyone wishing to understand what is distinctive about the discursive approach, and how radical its respecification of traditional notions will be.

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Section: Facts and Neutralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Discursive Social Psychology: From Attitudes to Evaluative Practices

Potter

1998

European Review of Social Psychology

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186

149

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“…Furthermore, within the social psychological approach there are some theorists who focus strongly on language (e.g., Au, 1986;Brown & Fish, 1983;Fiedler & Semin, 1988) and others who focus on social interaction (e.g., Edwards & Potter, 1993;Hilton, 1990). The social psychological approach has produced some useful insights about why verbs have NP1 or NP2 biases.…”

Section: Two Views About Implicit Causalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is fortunate, because there is considerable disagreement about the underlying source of implicit causality. Indeed, there are two different, though not entirely divorced, perspectives on implicit causality, which have yet to be properly integrated (see e.g., Edwards & Potter, 1993). The original perspective of Garvey and Caramazza was a (psycho)linguistic one.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Locus of Implicit Causality Effects in Comprehension

Garnham

Traxler

Oakhill

et al. 1996

Journal of Memory and Language

150

122

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Implicit causality might enable readers to focus on the imputed cause of an event and make it the default referent of a following pronoun. Alternatively, its effects might arise only when a following explicit cause is integrated with a description of the event. In three probe recognition experiments, in which the participants in the events were of the same sex, the only reliable effect -apart from the advantage of first mention -was that of whether implicit and explicit causes were the same. This effect was independent of whether the probe named the referent of the pronoun. In a fourth experiment, in which the two participants were of different sexes, there was no simple effect of implicit causality, but there was an advantage for the pronoun's referent. These results are consistent with the view that implicit causality has its effects at integration. We discuss their broader implications for theories of comprehension.There is a growing consensus that mental representations of the content of text take the form of discourse models (e.g., Garnham, 1981Garnham, , 1987Johnson-Laird & Garnham, 1980;Greene, McKoon, & Ratcliff, 1992;Stenning, 1978;Webber, 1979) and that the primary goal of a theory of text comprehension is to specify the nature of such models and of the processes that construct them. Discourse models contain representations of people, things, events (in the broad sense of that term used in semantic theory; see e.g., Frawley, 1992, in which it covers acts, actions, states, and processes), and so on, in the real, or an imaginary, world. However, beyond this basic specification, there is considerable disagreement about their nature and about the mental processes that build them. One important issue is the extent to which discourse models are elaborated using information that is not explicit in a text, but which must be derived inferentially (see e.g., , vs Garnham, 1992, and Glenberg & Mathew, 1992. Another set of issues, and one that has received less attention in the psychological literature, concerns the internal structure of discourse models. These issues, which can loosely be dubbed "issues-of focus," are crucial to online theories Address correspondence and reprint requests to Alan Garnham, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, United Kingdom. Tele-phone: +44 1273 678337. Fax: +44 1273 678611. alang@epunix.sussex.ac.uk. HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript of text comprehension, because the internal structure of discourse models determines which parts of those models are most available in memory. It is one of these issues that we address in this paper.Some of the things mentioned in a text are in focus and, therefore, readily available for later reference, and others are not. Both local, sentence level, and global, discourse level, mechanisms may contribute to whether an item is in focus and hence can readily be referred to again (e.g., using a pronoun). However, the details of these mechanisms rema...

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“…While cognitive explanations of these findings are necessary, they may be incomplete if they overlook the social processes through which knowledge about social categories is constructed in interaction (c.f., Antaki, 1981;Crawford, 1995;Edwards & Potter, 1993;Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Social constructionist and cognitive explanations of persistent behaviour patterns are not mutually incompatible; both perspectives emphasize that people are constructive meaning-makers, and neither perspective necessarily assumes that scientific meaning making is beyond cultural influence (Jost & Kruglanski, 2002).…”

Section: Social Constructionist Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Androcentric Reporting of Gender Differences in APA Journals: 1965–2004

Hegarty

Buechel

2006

Review of General Psychology

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Androcentric thinking assumes maleness to be normative, and attributes gender differences to females. A content analysis of articles reporting gender differences published between 1965 and 2004 in four APA journals examined androcentric pronouns, explanations, and tables and graphs. Few articles used generic masculine pronouns to refer to both women and men. However, explanations of gender differences within articles that mentioned such differences in their abstracts and titles referenced attributes of women significantly more often than attributes of men.

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Language and causation: A discursive action model of description and attribution.

Cited by 267 publications

References 84 publications

Discursive Social Psychology: From Attitudes to Evaluative Practices

Discursive Social Psychology: From Attitudes to Evaluative Practices

The Locus of Implicit Causality Effects in Comprehension

Androcentric Reporting of Gender Differences in APA Journals: 1965–2004

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