Ambiguities in Causal Questions

Ambiguities in Causal Questions

Conversations in general, and answers to questions in particular, are governed by subtle rules that determine what is said and what is presupposed or implicated (Clark, 1979; Grice, 1975). The situation is especially complicated when the conversation is actually a test, as is frequently the case in psychological experiments. The unique feature of a test is that the questioner is not ignorant or puzzled, as questioners usually are. When the question is ambiguous, the respondent faces the bewildering task of choosing a state of ignorance for the questioner.

The Why question appears to be especially susceptible to ambiguities. Consider a perennial favorite of attribution research: “Why did Ralph trip on Joan’s feet?” (McArthur, 1972). The event in question is clearly specified, but the effect – defined as a contrast between the event and its norm – is not. To answer this question, the respondent must first identify what it is that the experimenter considers surprising. In everyday conversations, intonation provides a potent cue to the intended meaning of a question and the violated presupposition that underlies it. It is instructive to read the question about Ralph and Joan aloud several times, each time stressing a different word. The location of the major stress substantially reduces the number of possible interpretations, although it does not suffice to disambiguate the question completely. For example, the reading, “Why did Ralph trip over Joan’s feet?” suggests either that (1) it is unusual for Joan’s partners to trip over her feet, or that (2) although Joan’s partners usually trip over her feet, there was special reason to expect Ralph to be more fortunate.

An experimental demonstration of the ambiguity of why questions was described by Miller (1981). Several groups of student and graduate nurses were asked to explain their decision to enter the nursing profession. Different versions of the same basic question were used in the different groups. The basic question was, “Why did you go into nursing?” An analysis of the answers to this question indicated that student nurses cited significant aspects of nursing (e.g., “It is a respected profession”) more often than did graduate nurses. However, the graduate nurses were more likely to cite personal qualities (e.g., “I like people”). The critical finding of Miller’s study was that the differences between students and graduate nurses vanished when they were asked questions that explicitly specified the relevant norm: “Why did you decide to go into nursing rather than some other profession?” or “Why did you decide to go into nursing when most of your friends did not?” As expected, the former elaboration yielded a majority of answers for both groups that referred to nursing, whereas the answers to the second question referred predominantly to personal dispositions. In view of this result, the contrasting answers of the two groups to the unelaborated Why question appear to reflect different interpretations of an ambiguous question rather than different causal beliefs.

Questioners convey cues that broadly specify the content of the causal answers that they wish to receive (Lehnert, 1978). For example, the questions, “Why did Carter lose the 1980 election?” and ”Why did Reagan win the 1980 election?” refer to the same event, but differ in the explanations that they request: some noteworthy fact about Carter in the first question and about Reagan in the second. In the absence of indications to the contrary, the subject of the sentence is supposed to be its focus (Pryor & Kriss, 1977), and the syntactic form of the question suggests an equivalent form for the answer.