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Causal Attribution to Salient Stimuli

Considerable research has revealed that perceivers of a social interaction tend to attribute causality to the stimulus person who is salient. The present research tested the hypothesis that the control which salient persons exert upon perceivers' attentional focus yields the perception that these people also exert control in the social interaction in which they are engaged. To this end, subjects' visual fixation while watching a televised interaction between two actors as well as subjects' causal attributions for the actors' behavior were recorded. The duration of visual fixation upon an actor was greater when that actor was salient by virtue of a striped shirt, a leg brace, or red hair than when the actor was not salient. While the effects of salience upon the duration of visual fixation paralleled its effects upon causal attributions, the intercorrelations between visual fixation measures and causal attributions provided no support for the hypothesis that increased duration of attention to salient stimuli mediates the tendency to perceive them as causal.