Culturally Based Story Understanding
by
Hiba Awad
Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering
at the
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
June 2013
c Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2013. All rights reserved.
Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
May 23, 2013
Certified by . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Prof. Patrick H. Winston
Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science
Thesis Supervisor
Accepted by . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Prof. Dennis M. Freeman
Chairman, Masters of Engineering Thesis Committee
2
Culturally Based Story Understanding
by
Hiba Awad
Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
on May 23, 2013, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering
Abstract
Culture has a strong influence on how stories are understood. Accordingly, a full
account of human intelligence must include an account of cultural influences on story
understanding. The research reported takes a step toward accounting for cultural
differences computationally by extending the Genesis story understanding system so
as to enable Genesis to model Chinese and American differences in human story
understanding and question answering. I focused on two murder stories discussed
in a classic study by Morris and Peng, identified extensions to Genesis needed to
model Chinese and American understanding and question answering biases, and developed rules and concepts not already in the Genesis libraries. I determined that one
extension, a question-induced story augmentation capability, was needed to handle
questions such as “Did Lu kill Shan because America is individualistic?” Another
extension, the introduction of abduction rules, was needed to handle common sense
background rules such as “If person X kills person Y, then person X must be insane.”
I also conceived and implemented computational metrics to measure story coherence.
I survey the field of cultural psychology and suggest further steps toward an account
of culturally variant cognition.
Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Patrick H. Winston
Title: Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science
3
4
Acknowledgments
This research was supported, in part, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, Award Number D12AP00210.
First and foremost, I am eternally grateful to my thesis supervisor, Professor
Patrick Winston, for taking me in, sticking with me, and in that time, continuously
inspiring me with his endless knowledge, wisdom, humor, and stories. I am truly
obliged for his continuous patience, support, and invaluable mentorship.
Mark Finlayson, for contributing significantly to the ideas in this research, and
constant willingness to impart advise, and help overcome research roadblocks, even
when he’s out of town. Sila Sayan, for engaging discussions and much encouragement,
in both research and life.
Professor John Guttag for giving me the opportunity to serve as a TA twice to
his class, through which I gained an invaluable teaching experience.
Many dear friends and relatives for their love and support: Lana, Alice, Dahlia,
May, Rana, Ammar and Adri among others. I could not have survived without you.
MIT for giving me so much academically and personally.
My parents for their infinite love.
5
6
Contents
1 Introduction
15
1.1
Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
1.2
Foundation in Cognitive Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16
1.2.1
Culture and Cause by Morris and Peng (1994) . . . . . . . . .
16
Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18
1.3
2 Genesis and Genesis Enhancements
2.1
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19
2.1.1
Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19
2.1.2
Language Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
20
2.1.3
Representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
20
2.1.4
Events and Elaboration Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
20
2.1.5
Commonsense Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
22
2.1.6
Concept Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
24
2.1.7
Mental Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
2.1.8
Traits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
26
2.2
Murder Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
27
2.3
Causal Attribution Module . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
27
2.3.1
Explanation Attribution Module . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
29
Enhancements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
30
2.4.1
Commonsense Rules and Concept Patterns . . . . . . . . . . .
31
2.4.2
Prior Beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
31
2.4.3
Abduction Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
33
2.4
Genesis
19
7
2.5
Story Coherence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3 Experiment Results and Analysis
3.1
3.2
37
Experiment Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
3.1.1
Elaboration Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
3.1.2
Commonsense Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
3.1.3
Situational Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
3.1.4
Abduction Rule to Infer Causal Trait . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
3.1.5
Causal Attribution Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
Experiment Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
39
3.2.1
Commonsense Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
39
3.2.2
Concept Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
39
3.2.3
Causal Attribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
40
4 Related Work
4.1
35
49
Causal Attribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
49
4.1.1
Fundamental Attribution Error . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
51
“Lay Dispositionism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
52
4.2.1
Implicit Personality Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
52
Cultural Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
53
4.3.1
Cultural Bias in Causal Attribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
54
4.3.2
Culturally Differences in Conceptions of Agency . . . . . . . .
54
4.3.3
Cultural Differences in Dispositional Thinking . . . . . . . . .
56
4.4
Traits in Genesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
57
4.5
Cultural Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
58
4.2
4.3
5 Next Steps
59
5.1
Causal Attribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
59
5.2
“Lay Dispositionism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
60
5.2.1
Trait Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
60
5.2.2
Trait Inference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
60
8
5.2.3
Behavior Prediction from Trait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
62
5.3
Cultural Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
62
5.4
Coherence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
63
5.4.1
63
Characteristic Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6 Contributions
65
A Stories
67
A.1 Original Lu murder story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
67
A.2 Original McIlvane murder story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
68
A.3 Genesis Lu murder story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
69
A.4 Genesis McIlvane murder story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
71
B Commonsese rules
75
B.1 Eastern Commonsense Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
75
B.2 Western Commonsense Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
76
B.3 General Commonsense Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
76
9
10
List of Figures
1-1 Results from Culture and Cause (Morris and Peng, 1994). . . . . . .
18
2-1 Examples of events in Genesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
21
2-2 Example of an elaboration graph from Romeo and Juliet. . . . . . . .
22
2-3 Elaboration graph for Brutus and Ceasar story with all three commonsense rules. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
24
2-4 Elaboration graph for Julius Ceasar story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
2-5 Experimental Setup. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
28
2-6 Genesis can answer question of why on three different levels. . . . . .
30
2-7 Initial reading of murder in America story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
33
2-8 Murder in America adjusted with prior beliefs when probed. . . . . .
34
2-9 Elaboration graph for story abduction test. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
35
2-10 Coherence metrics displayed for the three Shakespeare stories in Genesis. 36
3-1 Lu murder story from Chinese perspective. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
41
3-2 Lu murder story from American perspective. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
42
3-3 McIlvane murder story from Chinese perspective. . . . . . . . . . . .
43
3-4 McIlvane murder story from American perspective. . . . . . . . . . .
44
3-5 Results of causal attribution module for factor: America is individualistic. 45
3-6 Results of causal attribution module for factor: American media glorifies violence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
45
3-7 Results of causal attribution module for factor: Goertz (Lu’s advisor)
fails to help Lu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
46
3-8 Results of causal attribution module for factor: Lu is insane. . . . . .
46
11
3-9 Results of causal attribution module for factor: McIlvane’s supervisor
failed to help McIlvane. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
47
3-10 Results of causal attribution module for factor: McIlvane is insane. .
47
4-1 Kelley’s covariation model of attribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
50
12
List of Tables
2.1
Causal judgement result for factors from experiment simplified for Genesis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
13
29
14
Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1
Vision
Story telling and understanding are integral to human intelligence. Stories pervade
the human experience and for many centuries humans have used them to think and
learn about the world. Patrick Henry Winston (Winston, 2011) has posited the role of
stories in human intelligence in the Strong Story Hypothesis: “The mechanisms that
enable humans to tell, understand, and recombine stories separate human intelligence
from that of other primate.” So to build intelligent machines, we must understand
and model human story understanding. The Genesis System is a research platform
that aspires to model human story understanding (Winston, 2012a,b).
Culture is a “suitcase word”, a term first used by Marvin Minsky, to refer to
words that encompass a wide jumble of different ideas. For the purposes of this work,
culture is best considered as a collective phenomena composed of both socially shared
meanings such as beliefs, values, ideas, and behavior patterns, such as customs and
conventions. Geerd Hofstede puts it nicely: “Culture is the collective programming of
the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.”
(Hofstede, 1980) Another pertaining definition of culture is that of anthropologist
Adamson Hoebel: “[culture is] an integrated system of learned behavior patterns
which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not a result of
biological inheritance.” (Hoebel, 1966) Culture patterns the human experience and
15
strongly impacts cognition. Much research in the field of cognitive psychology has
discovered specific differences between Eastern and Western cultures in several basic
cognitive processes such as attention and perception. (Markus and Kitayama, 1991)
One way to better understand culture in general, and its influence on story understanding in particular, is to model culturally influenced story understanding in
the Genesis System, taking it to a level where it begins to reflect humanlike interpretations of stories that show cultural biases. My research takes a step towards this
goal by investigating, demonstrating, and describing how Genesis can reflect culturally sensitive story understanding consistent with particular research findings from
cognitive science.
1.2
Foundation in Cognitive Science
Violent murders are strikingly senseless. Yet despite their senselessness or perhaps
because of it, we invariably obsess over understanding the motives and reasons causing
this seemingly incomprehensible aberrant behavior. As I was writing this thesis,
Boston fell victim to a shocking episode of senseless violence. Everyone struggled to
make sense of the events and reconstruct a coherent narrative. The question “Why?”
hung heavily on everyone’s mind. Were the Boston bombers brainwashed by Jihadists
ideology, were they disillusioned immigrants, hateful for failing to assimilate, or were
they simply mentally insane murderers?
1.2.1
Culture and Cause by Morris and Peng (1994)
The cognitive science paper that inspired this research is “Culture and Cause” (Morris
and Peng, 1994). In one of the studies in the paper, the researchers set out to
understand how subjects from Eastern and Western cultures explain similar cases
of senseless violence. The paper presented three studies, all of which found that
Chinese tend to attribute the cause of social behavior to situational factors whereas
Americans attribute the same behavior to the inherent disposition of the murderer.
In the first study presented in the paper, differences in causal attribution of behavior,
16
were examined for a physical event as well a nonhuman event in a social context. The
physical event involved an object moving across a field, and the social event involved
an individual fish swimming in front of a group of wish. Morris and Peng found that
causal perceptions of social events but not physical events differed between American
and Chinese students. American subjects attributed the fish behavior to internal
factors such as an individual leading a group, while Chinese subjects would attribute
it to an external situational force such as pressure from the group. In the second study
researchers analyzed stories of the same murder incident from English and Chinese
newspapers and found that English language newspapers explained the crime as a
result of the murderer’s disposition more than their counterpart Chinese newspaper.
In return Chinese language newspapers explained the crime as a result of situational
factors more than their English counterpart. In the third study presented by this
paper, American and Chinese graduate students were surveyed about their causal
attributions for two murder stories. Researchers presented subjects with two reports
of recent murders, one committed by a Chinese student in Iowa, named Lu, and
another by an American post office worker in Michigan, named McIlvane. The reports
were based on descriptions given in both English and Chinese language media and
were of equal length. The reports also contained equivalent amounts of information
about the murderer’s personal dispositions, situational pressures, and actions, in order
to balance the information about each murder. The study presented subjects with a
series of parallel sets of causes for each murder, drawn from media reports. Half of the
causes were dispositional and the other half were situational. The sets of causes were
presented in random order and subjects were instructed to weight the importance of
each factor from a scale of 1 to 7 where 1 is not a cause at all, and 7 is a very strong
cause. The results of the experiment are summarized in Figure 1-1 extracted from the
Morris-Peng paper. I attempted to replicate the results computationally within the
Genesis system, as an exploratory analysis of culturally based story understanding,
and to shed light onto the knowledge and knowledge representations required to
capture and model some effects of culture on cognition
17
964
MICHAEL W. MORRIS AND KAIPING PENG
Table 4
Some Causes ofMurder That Were Weighted Differently Across Cultures (Study 3: Causal Judgment Task)
Lu murder
Mcllvane murder
Personal dispositions
Personal dispositions
Lu was mentally imbalanced because his life consisted only
of work, without other activities which relieve stress.
Lu drove himself crazy by putting too much pressure on
himself.
Lu had chronic personality problems.
A 4.5****
C1.8
A 4.6****
C2.4
A 4.2*
C2.4
Lu was a psychological time bomb—someone with a hidden A3.1*
mental illness that suddenly explodes.
C1.8
If Lu couldn't win, he didn't care about anything else.
A4.1*
C2.6
Lu was obsessed with the award and lost his grip on reality. A 4.5
C3.5
Mcllvane was mentally imbalanced because his life consisted A 2.4
only of violent activities such as hunting and martial arts. C2.5
Mcllvane drove himself crazy by worrying too much about
A 2.9
getting his job back.
C3.1
Mcllvane had chronic personality problems.
A 4.3
C3.7
Mcllvane was a psychological time bomb—someone with a A 2.8
hidden mental illness that suddenly explodes.
C2.8
If Mcllvane couldn't get his way, he didn't care about
A 3.2
anything else.
C4.2
Mcllvane was obsessed with getting his job back and lost his A 4.1
grip on reality.
C3.8
Situational factors
Situational factors
America's extremely individualistic, selfish values corrupt
foreign students.
American movies and television glorify violent revenge
tactics.
The advisor failed in his duties to help Gang Lu and
respond to his increasing frustration.
A 1.2**
C2.5
A 1.5***
C3.6
A 2.4***
C4.6
The ruthless and brutal behavior of Chinese Communists
set an example for him.
The chaotic times of the Cultural Revolution in China
(persecution of intellectuals, etc.) created a generation
lacking traditional morals and respect for others.
A 1.5
C1.3
A 1.8
C2.2
The recession has hurt the job market, which places stress
on people seeking a new job.
A 2.4*
C3.5
This was an extreme example of behavior that follows from
America's individualistic, selfish values.
American movies and television glorify violent revenge
tactics.
The supervisor and labor relations specialist failed in their
duties to respect Mcllvane and respond to his increasing
frustration.
The daily violence of the Detroit area set an example for
him.
The chaotic times of the 1960s in America (hippie culture,
drugs, sexual freedom) broke down families and
traditions, creating a generation without self-discipline
and respect.
The recession has hurt the job market, which places stress on
people seeking a new job.
A 1.8**
C3.5
A 2.7*
C3.8
A 4.1
C4.4
A 2.4***
C4.0
A 1.8***
C3.8
A 3.6
C3.6
Note. A = American; C = Chinese. Shown are the six items of each kind with greatest cultural differences in ratings of casual importance. Ratings
can be interpreted with scale labels: 1 = not a cause at all, 4 = a major cause, 7 = most important cause.
*p<.05. **/><.01. ***p<.005. ****p<.001.
Figure 1-1: Results from Culture and Cause (Morris and Peng, 1994).
in scenarios that altered situational pressures the murderer
ences. As can be seen in Table 4, Americans particularly emfaced. Results with personal disposition items did not support
phasized chronic psychological problems related to work and
our prediction. Overall, there was a marginally significant effect
Chinese particularly emphasized corruption by bad example
in the reverse direction: Chinese subjects judged murder to be
and disruption by social change.
less likely than did Americans, F( 1,53) = 3.76, p = .06. HowNext, we tested our predictions about the "ultimate attribuever, because these items did not directly alter personal disposition error" by comparing attributions for ingroup versus outtions and because items with the strongest reverse-predictedgroup actors. We predicted that Americans would give more
I weight
succeeded
modeling
aspects
the Morris-Peng
results
within
Genesis
framedirection results
(e.g., "What
if Lu the
had talked
to a therapist
to personalindispositions
and less
weight toofsituational
. . .") can also be interpreted as alterations to the murderer's
pressures for the outgroup murderer, whereas Chinese would
situation,
thisknowledge
result is somewhatand
inconclusive.
Results with
sitnot differentiate
on the basis of the
of the murderer.
As with
work.
In particular,
I culture
equipped
Genesis
the
additional
mechuational items strongly supported our prediction: Chinese
predicted, Americans placed more weight on personal disposijudged murder to be far less likely than did Americans, F( 1, 53)
tions and less on situational factors for the outgroup murderer;
anisms
needed
toshown
interpret
answer
about
thewhere
twosituational
parallel
murder
=questions
28.49, p = .001,
in scenarios
factors
were
the spreading
interaction
in Figure 8and
(upperto
panel)
was
changed. Mcllvane was judged to be far less likely to murder by
significant, F(1, 31) = 7.06, p < .02. As predicted, Chinese subChinese subjects
(M = 2.47) 2,
thanI bydiscuss
Americansthe
(M =details
3.43),
stories
Eastern
andpersonal
Western
perspectives.
In Chapter
jects did from
not differentially
weight
and situational
£(28) = 4.64, p > .001. In addition, Lu was judged to be far
causes for outgroup and ingroup murderers; the roughly parallel
less likely to murder by Chinese subjects (M = 2.75) than by
of Figure 8experiments
(lower panel) reveal and
the lackthe
of interaction,
F( 1, augmenting
oflines
various
Genesis
I .001.
follow
withand
the
Americans {M =mechanisms.
4.20), t(23) = 4.00, p <
The strength
31)= 1.80,p = .19.
consistency of this effect can be seen by the item results (see
Table 5).
findingprovides
evidence
for the hypothesis
that
detailed
results and analysis of the experiment
inThis
Chapter
3. In
Chapter
4, I review
Counter/actual Judgment
Chinese people represent behavior as situationally caused and
Americans represent it as dispositionally caused. In sum, ChiWe predicted
thatwork
Americans
would judge
murder
less
some
related
mostly
from
theto be
cognitive
literature,
andwould
in have
Chapter
5, I
nese science
subjects simulated
that the person
taken a less
likely in counterfactual scenarios that altered personal disposibloody
course
of
action
in
different
situations,
whereas
Ameritions of the murderer and that Chinese would judge it less likely
1.3
Overview
follow with a discussion on further augmentations based on the related work. Finally
in Chapter 6, I conclude by articulating the contributions of my research.
18
Chapter 2
Genesis and Genesis Enhancements
2.1
2.1.1
Genesis
Overview
The Genesis Story Processing system is an AI research platform developed by Patrick
H Winston and his students based on the Strong Story Hypothesis. Genesis takes as
an input a story written in plaintext English, translates it to Genesis’s internal representations, and then preforms bottom-up narrative understanding of simple common
sense information, and top down narrative interpretation of higher level concepts.
The system is motivated by the belief that intelligent story understanding systems
should mirror natural human story understanding. Hence Genesis is based on computational human-like reasoning methods instead of statistical analysis. The system has
visual representations to display the processed story, mainly the elaboration graph
which is a causally connected graph of each of the elements in the story. Genesis
also answers questions about its own operation, thus modeling humans introspection.
Inspired by the Propagator Model (Sussman and Radul, 2009), Genesis’s design is
based on the wire-box design paradigm. In the wire-box design, the Genesis system is
composed of many independent modules, represented as boxes which perform various
tasks, such as parsing, finding concept patterns, finding relations between events, or
visualizing events. The modules are connected through “wires” and interact with
19
each other via signals sent across these wires. Signals consist of messages, such as a
sequence of events. A wire-box design allows the implementation of modules to be
done in parallel. In addition, each module can output a signal without knowing the
destination, and can also process a signal as an input, without knowing the source or
implementation of this signal. Thus, the wire-box design promotes a high degree of
modularity and abstraction.
2.1.2
Language Processing
All the stories in Genesis are stored as English text, so the story texts can be read
and interpreted by both human readers and Genesis in their original form. In order to
parse the language of the story, the Genesis story understanding framework uses the
START language developed by Boris Katz and his students (Katz, 1997). The START
parser translates English sentences into semantic nets. A semantic nets models the
correlation between multiple objects to gain a better understanding of the objects
and their relations. The semantic net can identify and track objects across sentences,
which allows Genesis to keep track of characters and objects as stories evolve.
2.1.3
Representations
Genesis captures information in both physical and abstract worlds with a variety of
knowledge representations for concepts such as class, transition, trajectory, cause,
goal, belief, mood, possession, social relations, time, and role-frame. On the implementation level, all these representations are built on a substrate of four foundational
Java classes: entities, functions, relations, and sequences.
2.1.4
Events and Elaboration Graphs
Story text files are interpreted by Genesis into a series of events. An event consists
of an action relating concepts together, but the action can be complex. For example
in Figure 2-1a, the verb “like” relates Mary to John, a subject and a direct object.
The verb is depicted spanning both of its arguments, the subject and object. In
20
(a) Event representing the (b) Event representing the
sentence “Mary likes John” sentence “Mary likes to eat
in Genesis.
chocolate” in Genesis.
Figure 2-1: Examples of events in Genesis. The red bars represent relations, the blue
bars represent derivatives, the gray bars represent things, and the black bar represents
a sequence. The numbers next to object names are unique identifiers for those specific
objects for use by Genesis.
this case, the concepts are both threads, the simplest representation, but the action
“like” could handle more complicated concepts, such as eating chocolate, as portrayed
in Figure 2-1b. Event models can relate concepts of varying degree of complexity
together, resulting in a possibly complicated arrangement of events and relations to
model an overall concept.
Genesis visually presents the story it reads in an elaboration graph. An elaboration
graph consists of boxes, where each box represents a story element, an encapsulation
of a relation or event in the story, along with connections that show how the relations
and events are tied together casually. Figure 2-2 below displays the elaboration graph
for a snippet of Romeo and Juliet. The story text that rendered the elaboration graph
is the following:
21
Romeo loves Juliet.
Romeo poisoned himself because he thought Juliet was dead and Romeo loves Juliet.
Juliet killed herself with a dagger because Romeo poisoned himself.
Figure 2-2: Example of an elaboration graph from Romeo and Juliet.
When humans read stories they make causal inferences about events in the story
without needing them to be explicitly stated. For example, if the story states Juliet
kills herself, then humans will automatically infer that Juliet is now dead. Genesis makes similar inferences, connecting events using commonsense rules, provided
outside of the story.
2.1.5
Commonsense Rules
Commonsense rules are applied to the story to causally connect explicit knowledge
in the story with inferred knowledge. Commonsense rules are articulated separately
for the story and can be applied to any story. Genesis employs two types of rules:
prediction rules and explanation rules. Prediction rules predict consequents as in
“If X kills Y then Y becomes dead.” Once these rules are provided for a story,
if at anytime during the story analysis process Genesis discovers a story element
matching an antecedent, the rule fires, and the consequent is automatically inserted
to the story representation with a causal link from the antecedent to the consequent.
The highlighted yellow boxes in the elaboration graphs are the inferred events from
prediction rules.
22
Explanation rules infer connections when an action would otherwise have no
known cause. Explanation rules have the structure of “If..., then... may...” The
may keyword is crucial, implying that when the antecedent “if... ” appears in the
story, the consequent “then...” may potentially follow. Thus if the consequent itself
appears in the story, it is then explained as a consequence of the antecedent as long
as no other explanation is available. Another interesting behavior of the explanation
rule emerges when it is declared with a negated antecedent, for example, “If X is not
sane, then X may kill Y.” In this case, when the consequent appears in the story, the
rule will actually trigger and the antecedent gets inserted in the story with a causal
link to the consequent, provided that the unnegated antecedent does not appear in
the story. So, for example, if X kills Y, and nowhere in the story does it declare that
X is sane, then one can assume that X is indeed not sane, and that is why X kills Y.
By way of illustration, consider the following:
Start commonsense knowledge .
X is a person.
Y is a person.
If X stabs Y, then X harms Y.
If X stabs Y, then Y may become dead.
If X is not sane, then X may stab Y.
Start story titled "Brutus and Ceasar".
Caesar is a person.
Brutus is a person.
Brutus stabs Caesar.
Caesar becomes dead.
The end.
The resulting elaboration graph is shown in Figure 2-3. Note the different behavior
of the three type of rules. The first prediction rule causes Genesis to insert the event
“Brutus harms Ceasar” in the story, highlighted in the elaboration graph to denote
23
that it is an inferred event. The inferred element is causally linked to its antecedent
“Brutus stabs Ceasar.” The events “Brutus stabs Caesar” and “Caesar becomes
dead” are also linked into the elaboration graph through explanation rules, as are
“Brutus stabs Caesar” and “Brutus isn’t sane.”
Figure 2-3: Elaboration graph for Brutus and Ceasar story with all three commonsense rules.
2.1.6
Concept Patterns
As the name implies, commonsense rules allow a very basic instinctive story interpretation. However humans engage in deeper reflective thinking when they read stories.
They identify themes such as revenge or victory, composed of several events linked to
each other. Similarly Genesis also discovers higher level concepts in a top-down interpretation of a narrative, based on user-defined concept patterns. Concept patterns are
narrative structures that specify roles and actions, such as villainy, revenge or reward.
They are composed of a group of connected events where each event is causally connected to at least one other event, though a “leads to” relation. “Leads to” relations
enables Genesis to recognize concepts even if many additional elements are present
between the antecedent and consequent in the leads to relation. The concept pattern
can be of any size and can have any structure as long as all the events are connected
and there are no loops. Like commonsense rules, a concept pattern is expressed to
the Genesis system in plain English. Revenge, for example, is a harm event leading
24
to a second harm event where the actors are reversed. Revenge can thus be defined as
following: X and Y are entities. X’s harming Y leads to Y’s harming X. Genesis can
thus discover one or more instantiations of these concept patterns in a given story.
As an example consider the elaboration graph in Figure 2-4 for Shakespeare’s Julius
Ceasar, in which Genesis discovers multiple concept patterns. The concept patterns
are displayed as clickable buttons below the graph, which show the instantiations
of the concept pattern in the elaboration graph when clicked. While simple stories
may contain little to no instantiations of concept patterns, more complex stories may
contain numerous examples.
00:11:25 EDT 27-May-2013
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Similarity panel
Dictionary
Julius caesar
Rules: 29
Cassius
hates
Caesar
Cassius
wants Caesar
to die
Inferences: 30
Cassius
Concepts: 17
Discoveries: 5
Explicit elements: 11
Inferred elements: 27
Total elements: 38
Time: 14.7 sec
Cassius
Anthony
Anthony
Brutus
Brutus
Brutus
Brutus
Anthony
murders
harms
harms
angers
Caesar
Caesar
Anthony
Anthony
harm Brutus
Anthony
Caesar
The people
Anthony
The people
wants to
becomes
harm Cassius
dead
Anthony
persuades the
people's
attacking
Cassius
dead
attack
Cassius
becomes
unhappy
The people
wants to
anger
Cassius
Anthony
persuades
people's
attacking Brutus
People
People
People
Brutus wants
attack
harm
anger
to harm
Brutus
Brutus
Brutus
people
Cassius
wants to
harm the
people
Brutus
becomes
unhappy
Cassius
harm
becomes
Cassius
unhappy
Brutus
fights
harms
Anthony
himself
Caesar is
Cassius
Anthony's
becomes
himself
Cassius
Caesar
Brutus
friend
dead
angers
becomes
Brutus kills
to become
harms
Cassius
Brutus
wants Caesar
Cassius
persuades
Brutus to
murder Caesar
harms
murders
Caesar
Cassius
dead
Cassius
harms
himself
Cassius
kills
himself
You START
julius
caesar's story
Brutus is a
person
Analysis
Answered prayer
Suicide
Suicide
Engineered revenge
Engineered revenge
100%
Elaboration graph
Figure 2-4: Elaboration graph for Julius Ceasar story.
2.1.7
Mental Models
A mental model is a hypothetical internal representation of the external world or
reality that humans construct in order to think about the world. Marvin Minsky
Minsky (1988) describes a mental model in a person’s head, nominally Mary, “as all
the structures in Mary’s head that Mary’s agencies can use to answer questions about
things in the world.” It seems obvious or perhaps just useful that such an internal
25
conceptualization of the external world should exist. Hence much of people’s mental
activity, their views of the world, of themselves, or of the tasks they are to perform
should depend on these internal representations that we label as our mental model.
2.1.8
Traits
Humans constantly engage in portraying personalities in the form of traits especially
in story telling. We constantly use statements such as “John is aggressive.” “Mary is
timid.” Despite how difficult it is to grasp the mechanisms of the mind, personalities
are somehow much easier to portray and label. Indeed traits are crucial to story
telling and understanding in particular. As a result, the Genesis system includes a
capability that allows traits to be assigned to characters in stories by encapsulating
trait characteristics in mental models. With Genesis’s current trait capability, a trait
definition can include a particular set of rules only applicable to characters possessing
the trait. In addition it can include concept patterns, also associated with characters
possessing those trait. For example a definition for the greedy trait can include the
following:
Start commonsense knowledge.
X is a person.
Y is a person.
Z is a person.
aa is an action.
if X is greedy and X is the wife of Y, then X may persuade Y to want to become king.
Start reflective knowledge.
Start description of "Tragic greed".
X is Y’s relation.
X’s being greedy leads to Z’s harming Y.
The end.
As a result of this trait definition, if Lady Macbeth is declared greedy in the
Macbeth story, Genesis will infer that Lady Macbeth may persuade Macbeth to want
to become king. In addition Genesis now discovers an instance of “tragic greed” in
the Macbeth story.
26
2.2
Murder Stories
In the research paper “Culture and Cause” (Morris and Peng, 1994), the two murder
stories resulted in culturally variant causal analysis of the murder causes, indicating
culturally variant underlying interpretations of the story. So these stories can serve
as an anvil on which to hammer out ideas on how culture can be modeled in a
computational story understanding system such as Genesis.
To do my research, I needed the original texts that were used in the Morris-Peng
experiment, which were courteously supplied by the authors via personal communication. Both stories are included in their original form in Appendix A.
The START language parser used by Genesis could not handle the stories in their
original form because the sentence structures and phrases are too complex. So I
simplified as necessary, aiming to preserve the original content and meanings in the
story and not oversimplify. The simplified stories used in this experiment are also
included in Appendix A.
2.3
Causal Attribution Module
The computational system to reproduce Morris-Peng results has three variable components: the commonsense rules to connect the story elements, concept patterns to
detect higher level meanings in the story, and the causal attribution module that takes
as an input a causal factor and returns a rating for its causal importance. The causal
attribution module can use the elaboration graph and concept patterns to evaluate
the causal importance of each factor. Figure 2-5 below outlines the basic structure of
the computational system.
I decided to keep the causal judgment module uniform across cultures and as
simple as possible. This decision is justified as being cognitively plausible because
the cultural variation in causal attribution discovered in cognitive science research
can be a result of culturally dependent beliefs, rules, and concepts, not necessarily a
difference in the machinery that manipulates these beliefs, rules, and concepts.
27
Story
texts
Genesis
!
Elaboration
Graph
Commonsense rules and
concept patterns.
Causal
Attribution
True/False
answer to
causal
question
Causal question
Figure 2-5: Experimental Setup.
Regarding the implementation of the causal attribution module, I developed a
simple hypothetical module. Because the elaboration graph already connects the
events that are casually related to each other, it seems that evaluating the causal
importance simply depends on whether the two factors are connected together or
not.
In the cognitive science experiment, the result of the casual analysis task was a
rating from 1 to 7. However, it’s difficult to hypothesize a computational module
that outputs a result so finely grained on a scale from 1 to 7. Instead I proposed
a simplified binary result, where a rating of above 4 translates to a possible cause,
while anything below 4 is not. In addition I proposed that causal factors which differ
statistically significantly will also be analyzed differently in the computation even if
they were rated as below 4, simply to emphasize the variation in cultural thinking.
For example, although the first situational factor in the experiment had an analysis
of below 4 by both cultural groups, it will have a positive result for Chinese and
negative result for Americans because it was statistically higher for Chinese, and I
intended to demonstrate this significant variation.
I proposed a simple implementation of the module such that if the two factors
are connected casually in the elaboration graph, not necessarily directly, but perhaps
through a chain of plot units, then the output of the causal analysis is true, and
otherwise false. I considered using the distance between the two factors to evaluate
causal importance, but I did not find that greater complexity useful.
I generalized this attribution module to take an input in the form of a question
“Did X because Y?”, where “X” and “Y” are both events. The module then returns
28
Lu murder
Lu is insane
America is individualistic
America’s media glorifies violence
Lu’s advisor fails to help Lu
McIlvane murder
American:
Chinese:
American:
Chinese:
American:
Chinese:
American:
Chinese:
true
false
false
true
false
true
false
true
McIlvane is insane
America is individualistic
America’s media glorifies violence
McIlvane’s supervisor fails to help McIlvane
American:
Chinese:
American:
Chinese:
American:
Chinese:
American:
Chinese:
false
false
false
true
false
true
true
true
Table 2.1: Causal judgement result for factors from experiment simplified for Genesis.
true or false if X and and Y are causally related.
In another substantial step, I simplified the questions used in my modeling because
I had to get them through the Genesis language understanding apparatus. Also, some
of the questions involved were semantically quite similar, so I pruned the question list
to address three situational factors and one dispositional factor. Table 2.1 outlines
the causal factors selected, and the simplified expected outcome of each causal factor
in this simplified system.
As for the concept patterns, it seemed at first that they didn’t fit anywhere in
such an implementation. However I decided to add a clause to the causal attribution
module that would return a positive result if it discovers that the causal factor was an
element of a concept pattern instantiated in the story. It seems cognitively plausible
that if a given factor contributes to a theme or concept pattern discovered in the
story, then that factor would have causal importance.
2.3.1
Explanation Attribution Module
An interesting capability added to Genesis in the course of this research was the ability
to answer question such as “Why did X?” where “X” is an event in the story, with
a subject and a possible object such as “Macbeth kill Duncan” or “Lady Macbeth
become happy.” Genesis can then answer this question on three different levels: the
personality level, commonsense level, and the concept pattern level. The personality
level identifies if a trait associated with the character caused the event, based on the
trait definition. The commonsense level identifies the commonsense rules that fired
connecting to the event in question. The concept pattern level identifies a higher level
29
concept associated with the event. Figure 2-6 shows the results of asking the system:
“Why did Macbeth murder Duncan?” for the Macbeth murder story in which the
characters are assigned particular traits.
Figure 2-6: Genesis can answer question of why on three different levels.
You can see that because Macbeth is declared as “evil” in the story, he is then
capable of murder. So in effect, the personality level of reasoning represents the
depositional reasoning associated with Western cultures, whereas the commonsense
level represented a more situational reasoning, associated with Eastern culture. The
concept level represents a higher level of reasoning, for which Genesis associated the
event with a larger abstract concept.
2.4
Enhancements
In order to raise Genesis to a level where it can model the Morris-Peng experiment,
as simplified, three general enhancements had to be made to the Genesis framework.
The first was the addition of commonsense rules and concept patterns to handle the
story. The second enhancement was a representation of prior beliefs in the reader’s
mental model that are not explicitly declared in the story, and a mechanism allowing
30
Genesis to inject these beliefs in the story when a question is asked about them. The
third is an additional type of rule, labeled hereafter as an abduction rule, allowing a
form of backward causal inference.
2.4.1
Commonsense Rules and Concept Patterns
A substantial step was the development of commonsense rules and concept patterns
to model human handling of the selected stories. The objective was to encode one
possible set of commonsense rules specific for each culture, and one general set, which
enables the interpretation of both stories. My goals were plausibility and generality; I
tried not to develop rules and concept patterns that would apply only to the particular
stories at the center of my work. Instead, I sought to develop rules and concepts that
would produce elaboration graphs in which Morris-Peng like results emerge without
being tightly tied to the particular stories involved.
2.4.2
Prior Beliefs
Several of the factors presented to the subjects for causal judgement in the study
were not actually present in the original story text, thus raising an interesting challenge. That is, these factors are hypothetical factors that could have played a role
in the murder, such as “America’s individualistic values corrupt foreign students”,
or “American media glorifies violence.” In that case, I proposed and implemented a
computational method of modeling prior beliefs and reflective thinking on hypothetical scenarios within Genesis. Genesis can now represent “prior beliefs” by associating
a personality trait with the reader, if the story text declares the reader’s personality
such as, “I am Asian” for example. In the Asian personality file, Genesis allows you
to declare certain beliefs such as “I believe that America is individualistic.” or “I
believe that American media glorifies violence.” These beliefs can then be injected
into the story when probed with a question such as “Did Lu become violent because
American media glorifies violence?” Upon being asked this question, Genesis searches
for the event “American media glorifies violence in the story.” When it does not find
31
that event in the story, Genesis then loads the trait mental model associated with
the reader and searches for beliefs matching the statement that “American media
glorifies violence.” If it finds a matching belief, it then injects that belief into the
story, determines the consequences of that newly added belief, and checks to see if the
belief now connects to the consequence in question. So essentially this feature allows
Genesis to represent prior beliefs associated with the reader, which get injected in
the story after being probed with a question. An illustrating example is the following
story text:
Start commonsense knowledge.
X is a person.
Y is a person.
SS in an entity.
If SS is individualistic then SS is corrupt.
If X inhabits SS and SS is individualistic, then X becomes corrupt.
If X becomes corrupt, then X may kill Y.
Start story titled "Murder in America".
"Asian" is a kind of personality trait.
I am asian.
John is a person.
James is a person.
America is an entity.
John inhabits America.
John kills James.
The end.
32
The text generates a story with disconnected story elements because none of the
rules fire, as shown in Figure 2-7.
Figure 2-7: Initial reading of murder in America story.
However when I ask Genesis the question “Did John kill James because America
is individualistic?” Genesis produces the elaboration graph in Figure 2-8. Note that
the story element “America is individualistic” is now inserted in the story, because
in the mental model of the “Asian” reader I had declared that:
I believe that America is individualistic
.
Additionally the insertion of this element fires some common sense rules, resulting
in a path that results in a “Yes” answer. Genesis highlights this path of causally
connected events in green, as shown in Figure 2-8.
2.4.3
Abduction Rules
An abduction rule is a commonsense rule rendered with “must” be, rather than “is” as
in “If X kills Y then X must be insane.” This abduction rule is in a sense, the reverse of
the prediction rule, because instead of inferring the causal consequent of the behavior,
it infers the cause, where causal flow is from the consequent to the antecedent. That
is, if a killing appears in the story, the rules fires connecting insanity as a cause rather
than consequent of the killing. This was an interesting and necessary rule to enable
Genesis to infer the cause, rather than consequence of a particular event during story
33
Figure 2-8: Murder in America adjusted with prior beliefs when probed.
understanding reasoning. I could have used the explanation rule “If X is not sane
then X may kill Y,” which would also infer that “not sane” is a possible cause of the
murder. However such explanation rules are presently limited to explaining actions
when no other explanation of an action is known. Consider the following simple story:
Start commonsense knowledge.
X is a person.
Y is a person.
If X kills Y then X is nasty.
If X kills Y then X must be insane.
Start story titled "Abduction test".
George is a person.
George kills James because James insults George.
The end.
Figure 2-9 is the resulting elaboration graph. Note the difference in causal flows,
where the regular prediction rule, added the consequent, as causal result on the
34
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Abduction test
Rules: 2
James
insults
George
Inferences: 3
Concepts: 0
Discoveries: 0
Explicit elements: 4
George kills
James
George is
nasty
Inferred elements: 3
Total elements: 7
Time: 0.8 sec
George is
insane
START
George
James
is a
Figure 2-9:You
Elaboration
graphis afor story
abduction
test.
abduction
person
test's story
person
Analysis
antecedent, thus connecting nasty to be a consequence of murder. One the other
100%
Elaboration graph
hand, the abduction rule infers that insanity was a cause of the murder, thus the
causal flow was from the inferred element, insanity, it to the antecedent, the killing.
Note also that an explanation rule would not make the insanity connection because
there is an existing reason for the killing.
2.5
Story Coherence
It seems that we often judge the relevance or causal importance of an event based
on how crucial it is to the coherence of the story. It makes sense that if an event
seems vital to the story coherence, then we grant it importance. If an event does not
contribute to the coherence of the story then it seems trivial. Furthermore, if an event
renders a story incoherent, then we seem to think it’s nonsensical or untrue. These
thoughts brought me a brief investigation of coherence in stories. The guiding question
was how to assess the coherence of a story qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, in
a computational story understanding system.
Narrative coherence can be thought of as how well the story hangs together or
the degree to which it makes sense. Causation stands out as an obvious metric to
evaluate coherence. A story can be deemed coherent if it includes enough details that
we can infer causality between the events of the story. Accordingly, I introduced three
simple computational metrics indicative of how connected the events in the story are:
1) Number of chains 2) Longest chain 3) Number of caused events. I hypothesized
that the higher the value of these metrics, the more causality between events in the
35
story and hence the more coherent the story. I implemented a basic visual component
to calculate and compare values for a set of stories, normalizing to the highest value
found in the set, believing that relative values are more meaningful than the absolute
values. For example the number of chains is divided by highest number of chains in
the story set. Figure 2-10 is a screen shot of the visual component displaying the
coherence metrics of three Shakespeare stories in the Genesis test set. Each metric is
on one axis of the plot, forming the “spider plot.”
Figure 2-10: Coherence metrics displayed for the three Shakespeare stories in Genesis.
36
Chapter 3
Experiment Results and Analysis
3.1
Experiment Results
I succeeded in developing a model that yielded encouraging results with a simplified
version of the Morris-Peng stories and questions, resulting in different importance
ratings for the causal factors according to cultural perspective.
3.1.1
Elaboration Graphs
The resulting elaboration graphs for the Lu story as interpreted by each culture are
shown in Figures 3-1 and 3-2. Similarly, elaboration graphs for the McIlvane murder
story are shown in Figures 3-3 and 3-4.
3.1.2
Commonsense Rules
The set of commonsense rules devised for and used in the experiment are included
in Appendix B. In total, thirty eight commonsense rules were created, of which only
three rules belonged exclusively to the Western perspective, eight belonged exclusively to the Eastern perspective, and the rest belonged to the general set of rules.
One abduction commonsense rule was used to infer insanity as cause of the murder
for the Western perspective of the Lu murder story. Using the commonsense rules,
Genesis connected the events in the story to emotions experienced by the actor such
37
as dishonor and anger. In addition, the rules connected the events in the story to
traits such as violent, corrupt, murderous.
3.1.3
Situational Rules
A distinct difference between the Eastern and Western commonsense rules was that
the Eastern commonsense rules connected the emotions and traits arising from the
situational events in the story to a “murderous” personality capable of killing, while
the Western commonsense rules did not make that connection. So for example an
Eastern commonsense rule was:
If X becomes corrupt and X becomes violent and X feels dishonored
then X becomes murderous.
3.1.4
Abduction Rule to Infer Causal Trait
The Western rule set instead inferred insanity from the actor’s actions, causally connecting insanity to the murder with the abduction rule. Significantly however, the
Western rules were encoded to exhibit a out-group bias, in which insanity was only inferred for non Americans committing murder. This out-group bias matched the results
of the Morris-Peng paper as well as other research in cognitive science which suggests
that Western cultures exhibit more out-group bias (Heine and Lehman, 1997).
3.1.5
Causal Attribution Results
Figures 3-5 to 3-10, are screenshots of the Genesis system when asked a causal question about the Lu or McIlvane murder story, based on the causal factors defined in
table 2.1. The answers are based on the causal attribution module outlined, and are
in line with results from Table 2.1. The system allows the user to enter any question
into the question expert box in the form of “Did X perform action Y because of Z?”
Next Genesis displays the results based on the causal attribution module discussed.
If event Z does not exist in the story, Genesis injects Z in the story if it matches
38
the beliefs in the reader’s mental model, then checking for causality as discussed in
section 2.4.2.
3.2
Experiment Analysis
The experiment has given us some insight into how to manipulate commonsense
rules to model cultural effects on story understanding computationally. However this
research remains a work in progress. This section outlines some points of inadequacy
in each component of this experimental setup.
3.2.1
Commonsense Rules
Although my commonsense rule set was intended to be as general as possible, it is still
only one possible set of rules from the space of many possible rules. The rule set was
also aimed to mirror how humans would interpret the events in the story. However,
in fact there is little “commonsense” involved in understanding or explaining such
aberrant human behavior as murder.
Still, the rule sets are plausible to me, which means that they at least model
my mental model of how representative people from various cultures must think.
Moreover, they provide a starting point for discussing adequacy and variation from
person to person.
3.2.2
Concept Patterns
“Most of our concepts come from the communities in which we are raised.”
(Minsky, 1988)
Although culture Somewhat surprisingly, the need for culturally specific concept
patterns did not emerge in the course of my work. I do not have a good sense of
whether this was a result of the character of the stories involved in my study or some
deeper consideration.
39
3.2.3
Causal Attribution
Human behavior is often inexplicable. Even when asked to explain our own behavior,
even mundane behavior, we are often at a loss for words as we try to think about
our feelings, motives, and intentions, as well as external factors, such as situations
and coincidental events. Cognitive psychologists have thus posited many theories on
how humans perceive and attribute causes of behavior. Understanding and modeling
accurate causal attribution remains a complex task under research. Thus, I think of
my modeling effort as just a first step toward understanding the extreme complexity
of human causal attribution.
40
murder story/e
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Lu
Goertz
Goertz fails
angers lu
to help lu
Lu feels
dishonored
Lu contests
becomes
angry
Lu
becomes
murderous
Lu
faculty
becomes
decision
suicidal
Lu feels
Lu envies
victimized
shan
Lu feels
Lu is
violent
goertz
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
A lab
Lu shoots
assistant
shan
Shan feels
goertz
frustrated
Lu shoots
becomes lu
Lu kills
Lu harms
goertz
Lu harms an
associate
professor
Lu harms
shan
Lu harms
itself
Lu shoots
honored
itself
Shan is
Lu kills an
successful
associate
than lu
professor
Lu isn't
Lu kills
American
shan
Lu kills
itself
Goertz is
lu's advisor
Lu doesn't
receive
national
award
Lu doesn't
find a job
Shan receives
national award
Faculty
rejects
appeal
Lu is lonely
Lu owns a
gun
Lu is a
person
Shan is a
person
Associate
professor
is a person
Lu is a
student
Shan is a
student
Shan
graduates
with lu
Shan is
younger
than lu
Lu is
Chinese
You START lu
murder
story/eastern's
story
Asian is a
Violent is a
Geortz is a
America is
person
an entity
Figure 3-1: Lu murder story from Chinese perspective.
Lu inhabits
America
Lu is a
bachelor
personality
I am Asian
personality
trait
Lu has a
trait
Goertz and
dissertation
lu isn't
defense
friends
Lu
practices
shooting
A chinese
Somebody
village is
marries
small
shan
Lu goes to
USA to do
phd
Lu passes
Lu has a
second
dissertation
dissertation
defense
defense
Shan is
social
41
Shan has
friends
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Entrance
exam is
highest
Shan comes
Lu has an
appeal
from a small
chinese
village
Shan is
successful
Lu murder story/western
Lu is
Lu kills
Lu is
insane
goertz
violent
Lu kills an
associate
professor
Lu kills
shan
goertz
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
Lu shoots
shan
Lu shoots
itself
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Goertz is
lu's advisor
Shan
graduates
with lu
goertz
angry
Lu feels
frustrated
Lu harms an
associate
professor
Lu kills
Lu harms
itself
shan
Lu isn't
Lu harms
American
Lu shoots
Lu harms
Lu
becomes
itself
Goertz
Goertz fails
angers lu
to help lu
Lu feels
Lu envies
dishonored
shan
Shan is
successful
than lu
Lu contests
faculty
decision
Lu feels
victimized
A lab
assistant
becomes lu
Shan feels
honored
Lu doesn't
receive
national
award
Shan is
younger
than lu
Lu doesn't
find a job
Lu is
Chinese
Shan receives
national award
Faculty
rejects
appeal
You START lu
murder
story/western's
story
Violent is a
Lu is a
Shan is a
Geortz is a
person
person
person
Lu inhabits
Figure 3-2: Lu murder story from American perspective.
personality
trait
America is
Lu is a
Shan is a
an entity
student
student
Lu goes to
USA to do
phd
Lu
42
Suicide
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Lu passes
Entrance
exam is
highest
Lu has a
America
Lu is a
bachelor
Lu has a
Associate
professor
is a person
Goertz and
dissertation
lu isn't
defense
friends
Lu is lonely
Shan comes
Lu owns a
gun
A chinese
ph
Sources
Results
Story
Similarity panel
Dictiona
cilvane murder story/eastern
Micilvane
swears at
supervisor
Supervisor
fires
Supervisor
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
fails to help
becomes
becomes
mcilvane
angry
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
doesn't
contests the
becomes
mcilvane
restore job
decision
Mcilvane
Supervisor
feels
mcilvane
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
supervisors
kills
supervisor
Mcilvane kills
labor
suicidal
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
works at the
harms other
appeal
post office
supervisors
Mcilvane
harms labor
relations
specialist
kills itself
Mcilvane
harms
itself
Mcilvane is
feels
loses
harms
supervisor
specialist
violent
frustrated
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
relations
Mcilvane
harms
dishonored
kills other
murderous
Mcilvane
Supervisor
ridicules
mcilvane
Supervisors
are abusive
Mcilvane is
lonely
Mcilvane is
a person
Supervisor
is a person
Labor
relations
specialist is a
person
Mcilvane
shoots
supervisor
Mcilvane
shoots labor
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
shoots other
supervisors
Mcilvane
shoots
itself
Mcilvane
fails at
kick-boxing
Supervisors
harass
workers at the
post office
Supervisors
intimidate
workers at the
post office
You START
mcilvane murder
story/eastern's
story
Asian is a
Mcilvan's
Mcilvane
supervisor
comes from
is a person
Michigan
Figure 3-3: McIlvane murder story from Chinese perspective.
personality
I am Asian
trait
43
Mcilvane
Mother
Mcilvane
His father
inhabits
abandons
has a
raises
America
mcilvane
mother
mcilvane
Mcilvane
Suicide
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
Mcilvan's
father is a
tough
ex-marine
Mcilvane is
American
An
ex-marine
is tough
Mcilvane
cilvane murder story/western
Micilvane
swears at
supervisor
Supervisor
fires
mcilvane
Supervisor
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
fails to help
becomes
becomes
mcilvane
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
doesn't
contests the
restore job
Mcilvane
works at the
post office
Supervisors
are abusive
angry
violent
Mcilvane
kills
supervisor
Mcilvane kills
labor
decision
Supervisor
harms
mcilvane
Mcilvane
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
kills other
harms other
supervisors
supervisors
Mcilvane
American
Mcilvane
loses
appeal
Mcilvane
shoots
supervisor
Mcilvane
shoots labor
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
shoots other
supervisors
Mcilvane
shoots
itself
Mcilvane
fails at
kick-boxing
Supervisors
harass
workers at the
post office
Supervisors
intimidate
workers at the
post office
Supervisor
ridicules
mcilvane
Mcilvan's
Labor
Figure 3-4: McIlvane murder story from American perspective.
I am
Mcilvane is
American
a person
supervisor
is a person
Supervisor
is a person
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
Mother
Mcilvane
His father
inhabits
abandons
has a
raises
Michigan
America
mcilvane
mother
mcilvane
Mcilvane wins
competitions
Mcilvane
enters us
44
Mcilvane
returns to
relations
specialist is a
person
comes from
An
harms
itself
violent
Mcilvane is
ex-marine
Mcilvane
Mcilvane is
feels
dishonored
You START
mcilvane murder
story/western's
story
Mcilvane
harms labor
relations
kills itself
frustrated
harms
supervisor
specialist
Mcilvane
feels
Mcilvane
Mcilvan's
father is a
tough
ex-marine
Mcilvane
returns to
Father dies
04:44:03 EDT 26-May-2013
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It looks like the reader ofLu murder story/eastern believes America is
individualistic and consequently the readerbelieves that Lu kills shan because
American is individualistic.
It looks like the reader ofLu murder story/western does not believe that Lu kills
shan because American is individualistic.
Causal view
Did Lu kill Shan because American is individualistic?
|||
Views
Controls
Start viewer
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Elaboration graph
Sources
Results
Story
Similarity panel
Lu murder story/eastern
Dictionary
Lu murder story/western
Lu is
insane
Lu kills
goertz
Lu kills an
associate
professor
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Goertz
angers lu
Lu
Goertz fails
to help lu
becomes
angry
Lu kills
goertz
America is
corrupt
faculty
Rules: 34
Lu
becomes
murderous
Lu
becomes
suicidal
Lu
becomes
decision
corrupt
Lu feels
Lu envies
victimized
shan
A lab
Lu feels
frustrated
Lu shoots
goertz
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
Lu shoots
shan
goertz
Lu kills
Lu kills
associate
itself
professor
Lu
associate
violent
professor
shan
Shan is
Lu isn't
Rules: 30
Lu kills
honored
American
Lu shoots
goertz
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
itself
than lu
Lu shoots
shan
Goertz is
Lu isn't
lu's advisor
American
Goertz
goertz
Lu
becomes
angry
Lu feels
frustrated
shan
Lu harms
itself
Goertz fails
angers lu
to help lu
Lu feels
Lu envies
dishonored
shan
Lu kills
successful
America is
Lu shoots
individualistic
itself
Inferences: 43
Lu is
violent
associate
professor
shan
itself
Lu kills an
becomes
Lu harms
Lu harms
Lu harms
itself
Shan feels
Lu harms an
Lu is
violent
Lu harms an
Lu shoots
assistant
Lu harms
Lu harms
shan
Lu feels
dishonored
Lu contests
becomes lu
Inferences: 29
Lu doesn't
receive
national
award
Lu doesn't
find a job
American
media
glorifies
violence
Lu inhabits
America
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Goertz is
lu's advisor
Shan
Shan receives
national award
graduates
with lu
Shan is
successful
than lu
Lu contests
faculty
decision
Lu feels
victimized
A lab
assistant
becomes lu
Shan feels
honored
Faculty
rejects
Lu doesn't
appeal
receive
national
Lu is lonely
Concepts: 15
award
Concepts: 18
Lu owns a
gun
Lu is a
person
Shan is a
person
Associate
professor
is a person
Shan is
younger
than lu
Lu doesn't
find a job
Lu is
Chinese
Lu is a
student
Shan is a
Shan receives
national award
student
Shan
graduates
with lu
Discoveries: 1
Discoveries: 1
Shan is
younger
than lu
Lu is
Chinese
You START lu
murder
story/eastern's
story
personality
Lu has a
Goertz and
dissertation
defense
Lu
practices
shooting
Asian is a
Violent is a
I am Asian
trait
lu isn't
friends
Lu passes
second
dissertation
defense
personality
trait
Lu goes to
USA to do
phd
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Geortz is a
person
Entrance
exam is
highest
Shan comes
Lu has an
appeal
from a small
chinese
village
Faculty
America is
an entity
Lu is a
bachelor
rejects
appeal
You START lu
murder
story/western's
story
America is
an entity
marries
shan
Shan is
Shan has
social
friends
Shan is
successful
Violent is a
personality
trait
Lu is a
student
Lu is a
Shan is a
person
person
Shan is a
Lu inhabits
student
America
Geortz is a
person
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Associate
professor
is a person
Goertz and
lu isn't
friends
A chinese
village is
small
Lu goes to
USA to do
Somebody
(d did (t(r cause (s conjuction (r
(d did (r cause (s conjuction (r glorify
property
(t american-29398) (t
american_media-20473) (s roles
(d
object (t violence-17843))))) (rindividualistic-28261)))
kill (t
(r kill (t
lu-18465) (s roles (d object (tlu-28923) (s roles (d object (t
shan-18493))))))
shan-28951))))))
phd
Lu
practices
Explicit
elements: 52
Analysis
Explicit
elements: 44
Analysis
shooting
Somebody
marries
shan
Suicide
Suicide
100%
100%
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Lu passes
second
dissertation
defense
Entrance
exam is
highest
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Shan is
Shan has
social
friends
Lu is a
bachelor
Lu is lonely
Shan comes
Lu has an
appeal
from a small
chinese
village
Lu owns a
gun
A chinese
village is
small
Shan is
successful
Elaboration graph
Figure 3-5: Results of causal attribution module for factor: America is individualistic.
04:39:54 EDT 26-May-2013
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Similarity panel
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It looks like the reader ofLu murder story/eastern believes American media
glorifies violence and consequently the readerbelieves that Lu kills shan because
American media glorifies violence.
It looks like the reader ofLu murder story/western does not believe that Lu kills
shan because American media glorifies violence.
Causal view
Did Lu kill Shan because American media glorifies violence?
|||
Views
Controls
Start viewer
Experts
Elaboration graph
Sources
Results
Story
Similarity panel
Lu murder story/eastern
Dictionary
Lu murder story/western
Lu is
insane
Lu kills
goertz
Lu kills an
associate
professor
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Goertz
angers lu
Lu
Goertz fails
to help lu
becomes
angry
Lu kills
goertz
faculty
Rules: 34
Lu
becomes
murderous
Lu
becomes
decision
suicidal
Lu feels
Lu envies
victimized
shan
A lab
Lu feels
frustrated
Lu shoots
goertz
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
Lu shoots
assistant
shan
becomes lu
Lu
goertz
Lu kills
Lu kills
associate
itself
professor
professor
Shan is
Lu kills
shan
than lu
Lu isn't
Lu kills
itself
Lu isn't
Rules: 30
associate
honored
American
Lu is
violent
goertz
Lu
becomes
angry
Lu feels
frustrated
associate
professor
shan
shan
itself
Lu kills an
successful
Lu harms
Lu harms
Lu harms
itself
violent
Lu harms an
Lu is
violent
Lu harms an
Lu shoots
becomes
Shan feels
Lu harms
Lu harms
shan
Lu feels
dishonored
Lu contests
American
Lu shoots
goertz
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
Lu shoots
shan
Goertz
Lu harms
itself
Goertz fails
angers lu
to help lu
Lu feels
Lu envies
dishonored
shan
Shan is
successful
than lu
Goertz is
lu's advisor
Lu shoots
Lu doesn't
receive
itself
national
Inferences: 41
Inferences: 29
award
Lu doesn't
find a job
American
media
glorifies
violence
Lu inhabits
America
Shan receives
national award
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Goertz is
lu's advisor
Shan
graduates
Faculty
with lu
Lu contests
faculty
decision
Lu feels
victimized
A lab
assistant
becomes lu
Shan feels
honored
rejects
appeal
Lu doesn't
receive
Lu is lonely
national
award
Lu owns a
Concepts: 15
Concepts: 18
gun
Lu is a
person
Shan is a
person
Associate
professor
is a person
Lu is a
Shan is
younger
than lu
Lu doesn't
find a job
Lu is
Chinese
student
Shan is a
student
Shan receives
national award
Shan
graduates
with lu
Discoveries: 1
Shan is
younger
than lu
Lu is
Chinese
You START lu
murder
story/eastern's
story
personality
Lu has a
Goertz and
dissertation
defense
Lu
practices
shooting
Asian is a
Violent is a
I am Asian
trait
lu isn't
friends
Lu passes
second
dissertation
defense
personality
trait
Lu goes to
USA to do
phd
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Geortz is a
person
Entrance
exam is
highest
Shan comes
Lu has an
appeal
from a small
chinese
village
America is
an entity
Lu is a
bachelor
Faculty
Discoveries: 1
rejects
appeal
You START lu
murder
story/western's
story
America is
an entity
marries
shan
Shan is
Shan has
social
friends
Shan is
successful
Violent is a
personality
trait
Lu is a
student
Lu is a
Shan is a
person
person
Shan is a
Lu inhabits
student
America
Geortz is a
person
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Associate
professor
is a person
Goertz and
lu isn't
friends
A chinese
village is
small
Lu goes to
USA to do
Somebody
(d did (r cause (s conjuction (r glorify (t
american_media-20473) (s roles (d
object (t violence-17843))))) (r kill (t
lu-18465) (s roles (d object (t
shan-18493))))))
phd
Lu
practices
Explicit
elements: 48
Analysis
Explicit
elements: 44
Analysis
shooting
Somebody
marries
shan
Suicide
Suicide
100%
100%
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Lu passes
second
dissertation
defense
Entrance
exam is
highest
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Shan is
Shan has
social
friends
Lu is a
bachelor
Lu is lonely
Shan comes
Lu has an
appeal
from a small
chinese
village
Lu owns a
gun
A chinese
village is
small
Shan is
successful
Elaboration graph
Figure 3-6: Results of causal attribution module for factor: American media glorifies
violence.
45
18:42:16 EDT 19-May-2013
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Similarity panel
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It looks like the reader ofLu murder story/eastern believes that Lu kills shan
because Goertz fails to help lu.
It looks like the reader ofLu murder story/western does not believe that Lu kills
shan because Goertz fails to help lu.
Causal view
Did Lu kill Shan because Goertz fails to help Lu?
|||
Views
Controls
Start viewer
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Sources
Results
Story
Similarity panel
Lu murder story/eastern
Dictionary
Lu murder story/western
Lu shoots
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Goertz
Goertz fails
angers lu
to help lu
goertz
Lu
Lu kills
becomes
goertz
angry
Lu kills
Lu is
goertz
violent
Lu harms
Goertz
becomes
murderous
Lu feels
Lu harms
goertz
becomes
decision
suicidal
Lu feels
Lu envies
victimized
shan
Inferences: 36
Rules: 30
Lu harms an
goertz
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
associate
professor
Lu harms
shan
Lu shoots an
Shan is
associate
successful
professor
Lu shoots
shan
Lu shoots
A lab
Lu shoots
assistant
shan
becomes lu
Lu
Lu harms
itself
Inferences: 25
itself
violent
than lu
Lu is
insane
Goertz fails
to help lu
associate
professor
Lu kills
Lu harms
shan
shan
Lu kills
Lu harms
itself
itself
Lu
becomes
angry
Lu isn't
Lu envies
Lu feels
American
shan
frustrated
Lu contests
faculty
decision
itself
Lu shoots
becomes
Lu kills an
Shan feels
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Goertz is
lu's advisor
Lu feels
victimized
A lab
assistant
becomes lu
associate
honored
Shan
professor
graduates
with lu
Shan is
Shan feels
honored
Lu kills
successful
Concepts: 15
Lu harms an
associate
violent
Lu feels
Lu shoots
professor
Lu is
frustrated
dishonored
Rules: 34
Lu
faculty
Lu kills an
goertz
angers lu
Lu
Lu feels
dishonored
Lu contests
Concepts: 18
shan
than lu
Lu isn't
Lu kills
American
itself
Lu is
Chinese
Lu doesn't
receive
national
award
Shan is
younger
Goertz is
than lu
lu's advisor
Lu doesn't
Discoveries: 1
Discoveries: 1
Lu doesn't
receive
national
award
Lu doesn't
find a job
find a job
Shan receives
national award
Faculty
rejects
appeal
American
media
You START lu
murder
story/western's
story
glorifies
violence
Explicit
elements: 48
Analysis
Explicit
elements: 44
Analysis
Lu inhabits
America
Shan receives
national award
America is
an entity
Lu goes to
USA to do
phd
Lu
practices
Faculty
shooting
rejects
Violent is a
Lu is a
personality
person
Lu inhabits
student
Lu has
Entrance
highest
exam is
entrance
highest
Lu passes
second
Shan is a
person
Shan is a
trait
Lu is a
student
exam score
dissertation
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
defense
Associate
Geortz is a
professor
person
is a person
Goertz and
Lu has a
dissertation
America
lu isn't
defense
Lu is a
friends
Lu owns a
Lu is lonely
bachelor
gun
Shan comes
Lu has an
A chinese
from a small
village is
chinese
appeal
small
village
appeal
Somebody
marries
Lu is lonely
Lu owns a
gun
shan
Shan is
Shan has
social
friends
Suicide
Suicide
100%
100%
Shan is
successful
Lu is a
person
Shan is a
person
Associate
professor
is a person
Lu is a
student
Elaboration graph
Shan is a
student
Shan
graduates
with lu
Shan is
younger
than lu
Figure 3-7: Results of causal attribution module for factor: Goertz (Lu’s advisor)
fails to help Lu.
Lu is
Chinese
You START lu
murder
story/eastern's
story
personality
Lu has a
Goertz and
dissertation
defense
shooting
shan
Violent is a
I am Asian
trait
lu isn't
friends
second
dissertation
defense
Somebody
marries
Asian is a
Lu passes
Lu
practices
personality
trait
Lu goes to
USA to do
phd
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Shan is
Shan has
social
friends
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Geortz is a
person
Entrance
exam is
highest
Shan comes
Lu has an
appeal
from a small
chinese
village
America is
an entity
Lu is a
bachelor
A chinese
village is
small
Shan is
successful
18:33:21 EDT 19-May-2013
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Similarity panel
Dictionary
It looks like the reader ofLu murder story/eastern does not believe that Lu kills
shan because Lu is insane.
It looks like the reader ofLu murder story/western believes that Lu kills shan
because Lu is insane.
Causal view
Did Lu kill Shan because Lu is insane?
|||
Views
Controls
Start viewer
Experts
Elaboration graph
Sources
Results
Story
Similarity panel
Lu murder story/eastern
Lu fails
dissertation
defense
Goertz
angers lu
Lu feels
dishonored
Lu
Goertz fails
to help lu
Lu
becomes
murderous
becomes
angry
Lu feels
frustrated
Lu kills
goertz
Dictionary
Lu murder story/western
Lu harms
Lu shoots
goertz
goertz
Lu kills
goertz
faculty
Lu
becomes
decision
suicidal
Lu feels
Lu envies
victimized
shan
A lab
Lu shoots
goertz
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
Lu shoots
assistant
shan
becomes lu
Lu
Lu harms an
angers lu
Lu feels
shan
Rules: 30
itself
itself
violent
Lu kills an
associate
honored
professor
Shan is
Lu kills
shan
than lu
dishonored
Lu shoots an
associate
professor
Lu shoots
shan
Lu shoots
Lu isn't
Lu kills
American
itself
Lu is
Lu harms
goertz
Lu kills an
associate
professor
Lu kills
Lu harms an
associate
professor
Lu harms
shan
shan
Lu kills
Lu harms
associate
professor
Lu harms
Lu harms
Lu shoots
becomes
Shan feels
successful
violent
Lu is
violent
Goertz
Lu contests
Rules: 34
itself
Goertz is
Lu fails
lu's advisor
dissertation
defense
Lu is
insane
Shan is
successful
than lu
itself
itself
Lu
Goertz fails
to help lu
becomes
angry
Lu isn't
Lu envies
Lu feels
American
shan
frustrated
Lu contests
faculty
decision
Lu feels
victimized
Lu doesn't
Inferences: 36
Inferences: 25
receive
national
award
Lu doesn't
find a job
American
media
glorifies
violence
Lu inhabits
America
Goertz is
lu's advisor
Shan
graduates
with lu
A lab
assistant
becomes lu
Shan feels
honored
Lu is
Chinese
Shan receives
national award
Faculty
Lu doesn't
rejects
receive
appeal
national
award
Lu is lonely
Concepts: 15
Shan is
Concepts: 18
Lu owns a
gun
Lu is a
person
Shan is a
person
Associate
professor
is a person
younger
than lu
Lu doesn't
find a job
Shan receives
national award
Lu is a
Faculty
student
rejects
appeal
Shan is a
student
You START lu
murder
story/western's
story
Shan
graduates
Discoveries: 1
with lu
Shan is
younger
than lu
Lu is
Chinese
You START lu
murder
story/eastern's
story
personality
Lu has a
Goertz and
dissertation
defense
Lu
practices
shooting
Asian is a
Violent is a
I am Asian
trait
lu isn't
friends
Lu passes
second
dissertation
defense
personality
trait
Lu goes to
USA to do
phd
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Geortz is a
person
Entrance
exam is
highest
Shan comes
Lu has an
appeal
from a small
chinese
village
America is
an entity
Lu is a
Discoveries: 1
America is
an entity
Lu goes to
USA to do
phd
Lu
bachelor
practices
shooting
A chinese
marries
shan
Shan is
Shan has
social
friends
Violent is a
personality
trait
Lu is a
student
Lu has
highest
entrance
exam score
Lu passes
second
dissertation
defense
Lu is a
Shan is a
person
person
Shan is a
Lu inhabits
student
Entrance
exam is
highest
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
America
Lu is a
bachelor
Geortz is a
person
Lu has a
dissertation
defense
Lu is lonely
Shan comes
Lu has an
appeal
from a small
chinese
village
Associate
professor
is a person
Goertz and
lu isn't
friends
Lu owns a
gun
A chinese
village is
small
village is
small
Somebody
Somebody
Explicit
elements: 48
Analysis
marries
Shan is
shan
successful
Shan is
Shan has
social
friends
Shan is
successful
Explicit
elements: 44
Analysis
Suicide
Suicide
100%
100%
Elaboration graph
Figure 3-8: Results of causal attribution module for factor: Lu is insane.
46
04:50:21 EDT 26-May-2013
Read
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Dictionary
It looks like the reader ofMcilvane murder story/eastern believes that Mcilvane
kills supervisor because Supervisor fails to help mcilvane.
It looks like the reader ofMcilvane murder story/western believes that Mcilvane
kills supervisor because Supervisor fails to help mcilvane.
Causal view
Did McIlvane kill his supervisor because McIlvane's supervisor failed to help McIlvane?
|||
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Story
Similarity panel
Mcilvane murder story/eastern
Micilvane
Supervisor
swears at
supervisor
fires
Mcilvane
becomes
mcilvane
angry
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
contests the
becomes
feels
loses
appeal
ridicules
mcilvane
Supervisor
doesn't
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
kills other
supervisors
Mcilvane
Supervisor
fails to help
Mcilvane
mcilvane
restore job
dishonored
Rules: 34
decision
Mcilvane
becomes
murderous
Mcilvane
kills
supervisor
Mcilvane kills
labor
relations
suicidal
specialist
Supervisor
Mcilvane
harms
kills itself
mcilvane
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
harms other
post office
supervisors
Mcilvane
Micilvane
harms
swears at
supervisor
supervisor
Supervisor
fires
mcilvane
Supervisor
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
fails to help
becomes
becomes
mcilvane
angry
violent
Mcilvane
harms labor
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
doesn't
contests the
restore job
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
kills
harms
supervisor
supervisor
Mcilvane kills
labor
Mcilvane
harms labor
relations
decision
specialist
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
harms
Mcilvane
itself
works at the
post office
Rules: 30
Mcilvane is
feels
violent
frustrated
Mcilvane
works at the
Dictionary
Mcilvane murder story/western
Supervisors
are abusive
Supervisors
are abusive
Supervisor
Mcilvane
harms
Mcilvane
kills other
mcilvane
harms other
supervisors
supervisors
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
feels
harms
kills itself
frustrated
itself
Mcilvane
Mcilvane is
feels
violent
dishonored
Mcilvane is
American
Mcilvane is
lonely
Mcilvane
loses
appeal
Mcilvane is
a person
Mcilvane
Inferences: 24
Inferences: 24
Supervisor
is a person
Labor
relations
specialist is a
person
Mcilvane
shoots
supervisor
Mcilvane
shoots
supervisor
Mcilvane
shoots labor
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
shoots other
supervisors
Mcilvane
shoots labor
shoots
relations
itself
specialist
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
shoots other
fails at
supervisors
kick-boxing
Mcilvane
Concepts: 2
Concepts: 5
shoots
itself
Mcilvane
fails at
kick-boxing
Supervisors
harass
workers at the
post office
Supervisors
intimidate
workers at the
post office
You START
mcilvane murder
story/eastern's
story
Asian is a
personality
Mcilvan's
I am Asian
trait
supervisor
is a person
Mcilvane
comes from
Michigan
Supervisors
harass
workers at the
post office
Supervisors
intimidate
workers at the
post office
Supervisor
ridicules
mcilvane
You START
mcilvane murder
story/western's
story
Mother
abandons
America
mcilvane
marine corps
Mcilvane
buys a house
in a quiet
Mcilvane
has
neighbors
Mcilvane
enters us
A
neighborhood
is quiet
Mcilvane
has a
mother
His father
raises
mcilvane
Mcilvane
returns to
Michigan after
father dies
returns to
Mcilvane
Mcilvane is
lives alone
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
works out
hunts
Mcilvan's
father is a
tough
ex-marine
Mcilvane
quiet
Mcilvane
Michigan
An
ex-marine
Discoveries: 1
is tough
Mcilvane
Father dies
Michigan
has a
father
Mcilvane is
mean
Mcilvane
I am
Mcilvane is
a person
Mcilvan's
supervisor
is a person
Labor
Supervisor
is a person
relations
specialist is a
person
American
Mcilvane
inhabits
Mcilvane wins
competitions
in martial-arts
neighborhood
American
Mcilvane is
comes from
Mcilvane
Discoveries: 1
Neighbors
like
mcilvane
Mcilvane
has a
threatens
has an
supervisor
supervisors
appeal
An
ex-marine
is tough
Mcilvane
has a
father
Mcilvane is
lonely
Mcilvane
Supervisors
are other
Explicit
elements: 47
Analysis
Mcilvane
inhabits
Mother
abandons
America
mcilvane
Mcilvane wins
competitions
in martial-arts
marine corps
Mcilvane
buys a house
in a quiet
neighborhood
Neighbors
like
mcilvane
Mcilvane
threatens
has an
supervisors
appeal
Mcilvane
enters us
A
neighborhood
is quiet
Mcilvane
has
neighbors
Mcilvane
has a
mother
His father
raises
mcilvane
Mcilvane
returns to
Michigan after
father dies
returns to
Mcilvane
Mcilvane is
lives alone
Mcilvan's
father is a
tough
ex-marine
Mcilvane
Father dies
Michigan
quiet
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
works out
hunts
Mcilvane is
mean
Mcilvane
has a
supervisor
Supervisors
are other
Explicit
elements: 46
Analysis
Suicide
Suicide
100%
100%
Elaboration graph
Figure 3-9: Results of causal attribution module for factor: McIlvane’s supervisor
failed to help McIlvane.
19:03:34 EDT 19-May-2013
Read
|||
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It looks like the reader ofMcilvane murder story/eastern does not believe that
Mcilvane kills supervisor because Mcilvane is insane.
It looks like the reader ofMcilvane murder story/western does not believe that
Mcilvane kills supervisor because Mcilvane is insane.
Causal view
Did McIlvane kill supervisor because McIlvane is insane?
|||
Views
Controls
Start viewer
Experts
Elaboration graph
Sources
Results
Story
Similarity panel
Mcilvane murder story/eastern
Micilvane
swears at
supervisor
Supervisor
fires
Mcilvane
becomes
mcilvane
angry
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
contests the
becomes
feels
Mcilvane
loses
appeal
Supervisor
doesn't
Mcilvane
kills other
supervisors
Mcilvane
fails to help
Mcilvane
mcilvane
restore job
dishonored
Rules: 34
decision
Mcilvane
becomes
murderous
Mcilvane
kills
supervisor
Mcilvane kills
labor
relations
suicidal
specialist
Supervisor
Mcilvane
harms
kills itself
mcilvane
Mcilvane
ridicules
mcilvane
Mcilvane
harms other
post office
supervisors
Mcilvane
are abusive
swears at
supervisor
Supervisor
fires
mcilvane
Supervisor
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
fails to help
becomes
becomes
mcilvane
angry
violent
Mcilvane
harms labor
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
doesn't
contests the
restore job
Mcilvane
kills
supervisor
Mcilvane kills
labor
relations
decision
specialist
Mcilvane
harms
supervisor
Mcilvane
harms labor
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
harms
Mcilvane
itself
violent
Supervisors
Micilvane
harms
supervisor
Mcilvane is
feels
frustrated
Mcilvane
works at the
Supervisor
Dictionary
Mcilvane murder story/western
works at the
Rules: 30
post office
Supervisor
Mcilvane
harms
kills other
mcilvane
supervisors
Mcilvane
Supervisors
are abusive
Mcilvane
feels
kills itself
frustrated
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
harms other
supervisors
Mcilvane
harms
itself
Mcilvane is
feels
violent
dishonored
Mcilvane is
American
Mcilvane is
lonely
Mcilvane
loses
appeal
Mcilvane is
a person
Inferences: 24
Mcilvane
Inferences: 24
Supervisor
is a person
Labor
relations
specialist is a
person
Mcilvane
shoots
supervisor
shoots
supervisor
Mcilvane
shoots labor
relations
specialist
Mcilvane
shoots other
supervisors
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
shoots labor
shoots
relations
itself
specialist
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
shoots other
fails at
supervisors
kick-boxing
Concepts: 2
Concepts: 5
Mcilvane
shoots
itself
Mcilvane
fails at
kick-boxing
Supervisors
harass
workers at the
post office
Supervisors
harass
workers at the
post office
Supervisors
intimidate
workers at the
post office
Supervisor
ridicules
mcilvane
Supervisors
intimidate
workers at the
post office
You START
mcilvane murder
story/eastern's
story
Asian is a
personality
I am Asian
trait
Mcilvan's
Mcilvane
supervisor
comes from
is a person
Michigan
You START
mcilvane murder
story/western's
story
Mcilvane
inhabits
Mother
abandons
America
mcilvane
Mcilvane wins
competitions
in martial-arts
marine corps
Mcilvane
buys a house
in a quiet
neighborhood
Mcilvane
has
neighbors
Mcilvane
enters us
A
neighborhood
is quiet
Mcilvane
has a
mother
His father
raises
mcilvane
Mcilvane
returns to
Michigan after
father's dying
returns to
Mcilvane
Mcilvane is
lives alone
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
works out
hunts
Mcilvan's
father is a
tough
ex-marine
Mcilvane
quiet
Mcilvane
An
is tough
has a
father
Mcilvane is
mean
A
Neighbors
like
mcilvane
comes from
Discoveries: 1
Michigan
An
ex-marine
is tough
Mcilvane
has a
father
Mcilvane is
Mcilvane
has a
supervisor
threatens
supervisor
has himself
supervisors
lonely
A
Mcilvane
has an
appeal
Explicit
elements: 48
Analysis
I am
Mcilvane is
a person
Mcilvan's
supervisor
is a person
Labor
Supervisor
is a person
relations
specialist is a
person
American
ex-marine
Mcilvane
Father dies
Michigan
American
Mcilvane is
Mcilvane
Discoveries: 1
Supervisors
are other
Mcilvane
inhabits
Mother
abandons
America
mcilvane
Mcilvane wins
competitions
in martial-arts
marine corps
Mcilvane
buys a house
in a quiet
Mcilvane
enters us
A
neighborhood
is quiet
Mcilvane
has a
mother
His father
raises
mcilvane
Mcilvane
returns to
Michigan after
father's dying
returns to
Mcilvane
Mcilvane is
lives alone
Mcilvan's
father is a
tough
ex-marine
Mcilvane
Father dies
Michigan
quiet
Mcilvane is
mean
neighborhood
Neighbors
like
Mcilvane
has
mcilvane
neighbors
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
supervisor
threatens
has an
has himself
supervisors
appeal
Mcilvane
Mcilvane
works out
hunts
Mcilvane
has a
supervisor
Supervisors
are other
Explicit
elements: 47
Analysis
Suicide
Suicide
100%
100%
Elaboration graph
Figure 3-10: Results of causal attribution module for factor: McIlvane is insane.
47
48
Chapter 4
Related Work
This chapter surveys the field of cognitive psychology for related literature on understanding and modeling cultural effects on cognition. These research findings guided
my work and led to suggestions for further research provided in the next chapter.
4.1
Causal Attribution
Causal attribution is the cognitive process by which humans explain the behavior of
others. People make explanatory attributions to understand the world around them
and to seek reasons for a particular event. Cognitive researchers have proposed numerous paradigms to explain the causal attribution process in terms of underlying
perceptual or judgement processes, but have traditionally assumed that the attribution patterns did not vary across cultures.
Fritz Heider is considered one of the pioneers of psychological research in attribution. Heider divided explanation of behavior into two groups, internal (personal) and
external (situational attributions), where internal attributions refer to the individual
characteristics such as ability, personality, moods, efforts, attitudes, or disposition
and external refers to the situation in which the action took place, such as the other
people or luck (Heider, 1944). This distinction between internal and external explanations was influential to attribution theory, and continued to be used in understanding
attribution. Motives played a very important role in Heider’s personal attribution
49
model, where “motives, intentions, sentiments ... the core processes which manifest
themselves in overt behavior.” (Heider, 1944)
The correspondent inference theory, proposed by Edward E. Jones and Keith
Davis in 1965 to explain causal attribution, states that people make internal inferences about a person when his or her actions are perceived as voluntary, unexpected,
and have undesirable social effects (Jones and Davis, 1965). The covariation model
of attribution (Kelley, 1973), another theory of causal attribution, provides a three
dimensional pattern for how humans make personal attributions, stating that people
judge attribution on the basis of three factors: Consensus, which is how other people
in the same situation behave, distinctiveness, which is how differently the individual
responds to different situations, and consistency, which is how frequently the individuals behavior is observed across varied situations. Kelley posited this theory of
covariation, inferring that people make causal attribution in a rational logical fashion
assigning the cause of a behavior to the factor that co-varies most closely with the
action. So people make personal attribution when the behavior has low consensus
and distinctiveness, but high consistency. On the other hand, people make situation attributions when the behavior has high consensus and distinctiveness. Kelley’s
theory and the examples of prediction are illustrated in Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1: Kelley’s covariation model of attribution. When behavior has low consensus and distinctiveness, but high consistency people make personal attributions
(top row). On the other hand, people make situational attributions when behavior
has high consensus and distinctiveness (bottom low)(Kassin, 2008).
50
Attribution theory has been criticized as being reductionist for assuming that
people are rational, logical and systematic thinkers. It also fails to account for the
social, cultural, or linguistic factors that can influence causal attributions.
4.1.1
Fundamental Attribution Error
A now classic experiment, conducted decades ago, showed that subjects upon viewing behavior of another person tend to draw strong inferences about the person’s
disposition, such as traits, attitudes and other qualities, even when obvious compelling situational factors are presented (Jones and Harris, 1967). This tendency to
overemphasize the effects of internal disposition and underestimate the effect of situation to explain behavior is recognized as a cognitive bias and was first coined as
the fundamental attribution error by Ross (1977), to emphasize its “pervasiveness,
robustness and illogicality.”(Fiske et al., 1998) Empirical evidence for the tendency
to attribute behavior to personal dispositions was so pervasive that it was described
as a universal human tendency (Gilbert and Malone, 1995). Although there is no
universally accepted explanation for the fundamental attribution error, social psychologists have proposed numerous theories for the causes of this error. One model
proposed by Ross (1977) explains the prevalence for making attributions to personal
dispositions by defining a set of judgmental heuristics: “availability”, “representativeness”, and “consistency.” Hence people tend to make more depositional attributions
due to personal dispositional causes having higher availability and representativeness
than situational causes. Another theory first proposed by Lerner and Miller (1977)
is the “fair-world” belief “that people get what they deserve.” So humans would attribute failures and successes to dispositional rather than situational causes because
dispositions are perceived as more changeable and controllable than situations, thus
satisfying the belief that the world is fair. Another explanation for the fundamental
attribution error is the “salience of the actor.” (Robinson and McArthur, 1982) That
is, when we observe behavior, the person is the primary reference point, and hence the
situation tends to be overlooked. Jones and Nisbett (1971) have discovered that the
bias for making dispositional attributions is more prevalent when explaining other’s
51
behavior than one’s own, thus belying an “actor-observer difference.” The salience of
the actor can explain the actor-observer bias because when the observer is the actor
he is more aware of the situational constraints imposed upon him and his situation
becomes the primary focus of his perception as he cannot see himself from an external
primary point of view. Consequently the observer makes situational explanations for
his own actions and dispositional ones for other people’s actions.
4.2
“Lay Dispositionism”
“Lay Dispositionism” refers to the human tendency to use traits as the basic unit of
analysis to explain or predict social behavior (Ross and Nisbett, 1991). A common
behavior associated with dispositional thinking is the tendency to automatically infer
a personality trait from a person’s behavior, a tendency labeled as spontaneous trait
inference (Winter and Uleman, 1984, Gilbert and Jones, 1986). Another inferential
practice associated with lay dispositionism is the belief that behavior in a particular
situation can be predicted from knowledge of the relevant trait (Kunda and Nisbett,
1986, Ross and Nisbett, 1991). Similarly lay dispositional theory is associated with
the expectancy that behavior will be consistent across situations (Kunda and Nisbett,
1986).
4.2.1
Implicit Personality Theory
Psychologists have increasingly recognized that implicit theories about the nature of
the self and others influence an individual’s judgements (Chiu et al., 1997). Implicit
theories are the knowledge structures or patterns that an individual uses implicitly
when making judgements and are thought to comprise of abstract representations
and prepositions about things and their causal properties, applied to any stimulus
within a domain (Morris et al., 1999). Thus like scientists, humans are guided by
these implicit theories in the questions they ask and answers they construct when
interpreting perceptive data. Implicit personality theory is the specific knowledge
patterns pertaining to the nature of personality that the individual uses to form per52
sonal impressions based on behavior. Studies exploring the relation between implicit
theories about the nature of personal attributes and lay dispositional thinking have
predictably found that those who believed that traits are fixed and static engaged
in more “lay dispositional” thinking. That is they had an increased tendency to use
traits to explain or predict behavior. On the contrary, those who believed that personal attributes are malleable and evolvable engaged in less dispositional thinking
(Chiu et al., 1997). Moreover the relation between implicit personality theory and
lay dispositionism was found in both United Sates and Hong Kong, suggesting that
this relation is generalizable across cultures (Chiu et al., 1997).
4.3
Cultural Psychology
Relying heavily on experimental methods, two decades of research in the field of
cognitive psychology have highlighted cultural differences in fundamental aspects of
basic psychological processors such as emotion, attention and perception (Markus and
Kitayama, 1991). A common hypothesis emerging and often guiding the research is
that independence versus interdependence or individualism versus collectivism are
the key differences underlying cultural variation in cognitive thinking. For example
research has shown that Westerners are more likely to define the self in terms of
personal independent factors whereas Easterners more commonly define the self in
terms of interdependent, relative or collective attributes (Cousins, 1989, Triandis,
1989). Research has also shown that Westerners engage in greater analytic objectprocessing activity while East Asians are more holistic and context aware, during both
visual perception and also reflective thinking (Kitayama et al., 2003, Masuda and
Nisbett, 2001). Masuda et al. (2004) presented subjects with a visual cartoon figure
presentation of a person in the center of a group of people and asked them to analyze
the central person’s expression. The experiment showed that Japanese’s judgments
on the target character’s facial expression are more influenced by surrounding faces
than those of the Americans. Masuda and Nisbett (2001) also concluded from their
underwater scenes experiment that Americans are also more likely than Japanese
53
participants to mark references to focal objects such as fish instead of contexts such
as rocks and plants.
4.3.1
Cultural Bias in Causal Attribution
Research in cultural psychology has raised doubts on the universality of the fundamental attribution error and suggested that it’s more specific to Western cultures.
Asian cultures instead tend to causally attribute social behavior to more situational
factors, showing markedly less tendency to commit the fundamental attribution error
(Morris and Peng, 1994, Markus and Kitayama, 1991, Miller, 1984).
Despite the growing body of evidence for Western depositional and East Asian
situational thinking, the sources of cultural differences in causal attribution are still
a subject of debate. One interpretation suggests that attributors in Western and
East Asian cultures have different orientations to social perception. That is, while
Western culture attributes behavior to properties of the individual agents, many nonWestern cultures interpret behavior as a “non-generalizing occasion-bound, context
specific manner” (Shweder and Bourne, 1984). A more moderate interpretation is the
suggestion that social perceivers in collectivist cultural settings attribute an actors’s
behavior to stable properties of the situations rather than the stable properties of the
individual (Krull, 1993). This position is more moderate because it retains previous
theorists ideas that perceivers attribute causes to stable properties of the objects.
The variance in causal attribution between the two cultures also seems consistent
with Western versus Eastern construal of the self; an interdependent view of the self
implies that actions should be viewed as products of relations or interactions with
others and are thus best understood with respect to these relations in the social
context. Perceivers with independent view of the self however will attribute actions
to the inherent disposition of the actor.
4.3.2
Culturally Differences in Conceptions of Agency
Morris et al. (2001) have proposed that social perception is best understood as guided
54
by implicit theories of “agency.” Similar to Minsky’s conception of mindless “agents”
interacting together to construct intelligence, an agent is a source of planned action
(Taylor, 1985). Thus agents are considered to act autonomously and intentionally. In
proposing that perceivers have implicit theories of agency, it means that perceivers
have implicit concepts of which kinds of actors have an internal intention, and are
also autonomous with respect to their environment (Morris et al., 2001). Agency
conceptions allow perceivers to make sense of outcomes by asking questions such as
“Who is behind this? What purpose does it reflect?” Cognitive theorists (Morris
et al., 2001) have argued that cultures have contrasting implicit theories of agency
about both the person and group. Whereas North American theorists hold the person
to be an agent, the theories in East Asian cultures conceptualize agency in groups or
non human actors. Beliefs about the autonomy of individuals and groups were studied by Menon et al. (1999) who found that compared with Americans, Singaporean
students were less likely to believe in the autonomy of individual persons and less
likely to endorse statements such as “individuals possess free will and “follow their
own internal direction” but were likely to endorse parallel statements about organizations. In one study Menon et al. (1999) presented students with a vignette about
a transgression, but varied among the participants whether the actor in the story
was an individual or a group. In one condition the actor was a bull, and the other,
a herd. The vignette was about a farmer grazing the bull (or the herd under the
second group condition), and the bull (or herd) changes direction suddenly, knocking
the farmer to the ground. Participants were asked to rate several possible causes
of the outcome, that included both dispositions such as aggressiveness of the bull
or herd, and situational factors such as provocation by the farmer’s behavior. The
same dispositional and situational factors were present in both the individual actor
and group actor conditions. Americans made more dispositional attributions for acts
by individuals and Chinese made more dispositional attributions for acts by groups.
Thus, interestingly, this experiment showed that the differences between American
and Chinese participants reverse depending on whether the actor is an individual or
a group. Other experiments have also pointed to domain specificity in cultural biases
55
towards dispositional attributions. In the Morris and Peng (1994) experiment for
example, cultural divergences in causal attribution did not extend to physical events
involving inanimate objects. These domain specific divergent cultural tendencies do
not seem to reflect general differences in orientations towards actor versus situation,
but instead seem to correspond to predictions made by the implicit theory of agency
model.
4.3.3
Cultural Differences in Dispositional Thinking
Dispositional thinking, closely tied to the fundamental attribution error, was also
found markedly more in Western cultures. The inferential practice of spontaneous
trait inference for example was found to be culture specific to Western cultures (Na
and Kitayama, 2011). In an experiment performed by Na and Kitayama participants
were first asked to memorize pairings of facial photos with trait-implying behavior. In
a subsequent lexical decision task, participants were primed with a previously memorized face. European Americans subjects showed clear evidence of spontaneous trait
inference: the decision for the word for the implied trait associated with that face
was facilitated, and the antonym of the implied trait elicited an electrophysiological
sign associated with processing of semantically inconsistent information. However,
the Asian American subjects showed neither of these effects. Some cognitive scientists believe that people from Western cultures are more prone to lay dispositional
thinking because they are raised to assume that behavior is a reflection of personal
characteristics (Jellison and Green, 1981). The suggestion by Chiu et al. (1997) that
different implicit theories of personality traits entail different uses of dispositions,
suggests that Westerners and Easterners have contrasting implicit theories of personality: Whereas individualist cultures tend to use dispositions to explain internal
causes of behavior, collectivists perhaps use them to describe trends of behavior that
are context specific. Consistent with this possibility are findings from self-description
tasks. Cousins (1989) compared the self-descriptions of American high school and college students with the self-descriptions of Japanese high school and college students
and found that the Japanese self-descriptions focused more on behavior and were
56
more role and context specific (“I play tennis on the weekend”, “I am a student). In
contrast, the American descriptions included more abstract psychological characterizations such as “I am optimistic.” or “I am friendly.” Interestingly however, when a
specific interpersonal context was provided so that subjects can envision the situation
(e.g. me at home) then this pattern of results was reversed. The Japanese showed a
stronger tendency to describe themselves in personal attributes than Americans. In
contrast, Americans tended to qualify their self-descriptions, describing for example,
“I am sometimes lazy at home.”
4.4
Traits in Genesis
Previous work in the Genesis group by Susan Song has demonstrated the use of
concept patterns within the Genesis framework to represent intentional personality
traits (Song, 2012). Song identifies intentional personality traits as traits that underly
strong intention not only summarizing habitual patterns of behavior. For instance
“vindictiveness” is a trait and “revenge” is an action arising from this trait. To
describe someone as “vindictive,” means that person has a strong tendency and desire to harm other people in retribution. So Song defined the concept pattern for
vindictiveness as the following:
Start description of
‘‘vindictive’’.
X is a person.
Y is a person.
Y’s harming X leads to X’s wanting to harm Y.
The end.
The concept pattern for vindictiveness expresses vindictive intention, in the idea of
“harming leading to wanting to harm” via the “Y’s harming X leads to X’s wanting
to harm Y” statement in the concept pattern. At the same time, the concept pattern
for revenge has already been defined in previous work in Genesis as the following:
Start description of ‘‘revenge ’’.
57
X is a person.
Y is a person.
X’s harming Y leads to Y’s harming X .
The end.
Song’s work takes a step towards enabling Genesis to represent and understand traits
in stories. Her work also suggests concrete steps to equip Genesis with the capabilities
to learn, infer and apply traits to characters in stories, thus illuminating the potential
of Genesis to model the fundamental activities of dispositional thinking.
4.5
Cultural Narratives
Research also points to the importance of cultural narratives in studying and understanding culture. Cultural narratives are the collections of stories tied to a particular
cultural group, such as stories from religious texts or folk tales. Cultural narratives
are often used to express a shared cultural identity (Barbour, 1974). Kilpatrick (1992)
hints that cultural stories give rise to sacred values. “Our ‘sacred’ memories may find
their source in stories.” Moreover, MacIntyre (1981) argues that cultural narratives
are in essence the “historical memory” of a culture. Narratives are transmitted across
many generations, retaining only what is culturally relevant or important. Thus because cultures transform these narratives over centuries, the narratives themselves are
a reflection of cultural knowledge. Mark Finlayson has highlighted the importance of
folktales as a window into culture and developed a new machine learning algorithm
to extract culturally-relevant plot patterns from sets of folktales (Finlayson, 2012).
Thus because cultural narratives are a window into cultural knowledge and thought,
they are of central importance to studying and modeling culture.
Such findings from cognitive and cultural psychology, as well as previous work
within the Genesis group guided me to a panoply of next steps, that I articulate in
the next chapter.
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Chapter 5
Next Steps
5.1
Causal Attribution
A robust human-like story understanding system must be capable of making sense of
behaviors by causal attribution. Although Genesis already infers causality with commonsense rules, research shows that the human causal attribution process is complex
as well as individually and culturally variant. The cognitive mechanisms of causal
attribution and the implicit theories guiding them are still a subject of research and
debate, but substantial research has pointed to recurring patterns and biases in causal
attribution, such as the division between internal and external attributions, as well as
the fundamental attribution error. Genesis has already taken a step in distinguishing
between internal and external causes of behavior with its current mental models of
personality traits. I envision extending that capability to model entire characters including their traits, motives, desires, beliefs or intentions. Such a model would enable
Genesis to distinguish internal from external causes of social behavior, and also to
commit the fundamental attribution error, common to humans, especially those from
Western cultures.
59
5.2
“Lay Dispositionism”
“A personality is merely the surface of a person. What we call traits are
only the regularities we manage to perceive.” (Minsky, 1988)
Modeling the inferential practices associated with lay dispositional thinking is a compelling step towards story understanding. Research indicates that humans engage
in dispositional thinking to varying extents so a robust story understanding system
should be able to fine tune the level of dispositional thinking to reflect different cultural or individual perspectives.
5.2.1
Trait Representation
While important work has been done to model “intentional traits” using concept-level
patterns, further work seems possible to model and implement a more nuanced and
humanlike representation of traits in Genesis. For example, often humans associate a
trait with a particular trend of actions or stories, perhaps tied to how the meanings
of this trait was learned. A more accurate trait representation in Genesis could be
composed of several stories or events exemplifying the behavior of characters with
those traits.
5.2.2
Trait Inference
An important step towards modeling culturally variant cognition in particular, but
also story understanding in general is modeling trait inference. Trait inference is
the process by which humans infer personality traits from behavior. Genesis has the
basic framework in place to permit an implementation of trait inference. Genesis
simply needs to match learned patterns of traits against the character’s thoughts
or behaviors. These patterns can be in the form of commonsense rules or concept
patterns that represent the trait. They could also be in the form of stories or typical
events that are typical of these traits. In his thesis “Enabling Imagination Through
Story Alignment” Matthew Fay designs and implements a structural alignment engine
60
that can compare two stories by aligning their plot units (Fay, 2012). Story alignment
can thus be utilized to match stories or concepts characterizing personality traits in
order to both learn and infer new traits. For example, a mental model for a trait
could include a list of events, or concept patterns, as evidence for that trait. So if a
pattern from this list is discovered in a story, Genesis can maintain a count of these
matched patterns and increase belief of the trait as the count increases. If the count
exceeds a particular threshold, the trait can be assigned. So for example Genesis can
infer that an actor is violent, if the actor harms other actors, more than a threshold,
x number of times.
With such a capability we can account for cultural influence on thinking or story
understanding by recognizing different levels of trait inference, and varying the counts
or threshold, for each level. Cognitive science experiments indicate Westerners engage
in a higher level of trait inference, so that tendency can be modeled by a decreased
threshold in assigning traits to characters.
Consider this simple story composed of two events as an example that ties trait
inference to causal attribution: Henry was sick. He performed badly on the Math
exam. We can assume that both the Western and Eastern perspectives had a representation of lazy as entailing a disinclination to doing things, hence leading the lazy
character to underperform. So upon reading this simple story, a lay dispositional
thinker, embodied in the Western perspective, would infer that Henry is lazy because
he underperforms on the exam, and would causally link laziness to Henry’s bad performance. Additionally a dispositional thinker would encode an “inability in Math”
as a disposition that causes bad performance on a Math exam. On the other hand, a
situational thinker, embodied in the Eastern perspective would not infer laziness from
a single episode of underperformance. Furthermore they would have commonsense
rules linking sickness to an inability to work or study, and hence to underperformance.
As a result they would causally link sickness to the bad performance. So a Westerner
or dispositional perspective would answer the question of why Henry performed badly
on the exam with Henry was lazy or Henry is not good at Math, whereas from an
Eastern or situational perspective, the answer would be Henry was sick and hence he
61
couldn’t perform well on the exam.
5.2.3
Behavior Prediction from Trait
Behavior prediction from traits is also a common practice associated with lay dispositional thinking. When an actor is characterized with a trait, the story reader can
employ the trait to predict the behavior of the actor. For example if a character X is
characterized as “vindictive” the reader should be able to predict that X will harm
Y, if Y has harmed X. In addition, after reading the story, the reader can also explain if their behavior makes sense or violates expectations. If their behavior violates
expectations then the reader may need to update their perceptions, whether it’s the
trait assignment or the definition of the trait. Song (2012) presents an analysis on
how behavior prediction from traits can be accomplished within the Genesis framework using concept patterns to define traits. While reading the story Genesis can
essentially set up expectations for characters based on the trait definitions and verify
that the results are inline with expectations.
5.3
Cultural Narratives
Researchers have shown that cultural narratives are a window into cultural values,
morals and cultural reflective thinking. An interesting next step for Genesis would
be to identify and collect repositories of cultural narratives. Encoding these stories
for Genesis and developing commonsense rules and concept patterns to handle them
could highlight the rules and patterns characterizing mental models of different cultures. Additionally, an interesting experiment would be to perform machine learning
techniques on different features of these stories such as concept patterns, commonsense rules or plot units. Training a cultural classifier based on different feature
vectors would grant insights on the features that distinguish the stories of one culture from another. Clustering the stories based on different distance functions, and
comparing the clustering results to their cultural classification would also be very
interesting. Caryn Krakauer’s work on story comparison using concept patterns be62
comes valuable in comparing cultural narratives (Krakauer, 2012). Krakauer built a
similarity module that can automatically extract and compare concept patterns in
stories to asses the similarity between stories. An interesting experiment would be
to use Krakauer’s similarity module as a distance function to cluster cultural narratives and next compare the clustering results with the cultural origins of the stories.
Additionally, the concept patterns used to compare the stories in Krakauer’s similarity module can also be varied, and the clustering experiment repeated, to investigate
which concepts would enable the similarity module to match the stories from the same
culture. These concept patterns would also be very valuable because they are indicative of the concepts shared across a culture’s narratives and are thus characteristic of
the culture’s mental model.
5.4
Coherence
Further steps can also be taken to understand and model narrative coherence.
5.4.1
Characteristic Behavior
One way to judge coherence is by how “characteristically” the characters in the story
behave. For example if the story presents a husband who is loyal and loving to his wife,
but then he cheats on her or abuses her, he is behaving uncharacteristically. Walter
Fisher who proposed the narrative paradigm, that all meaningful communication is
a form of storytelling, declares that the ultimate test of narrative coherence is “if we
can count on the characters to act in a reliable manner” (Fisher, 1987). The process
of determining whether characters are behaving reliably, is very similar to applying
traits in order to predict or explain behavior, and checking if the behavior fits or
violates expectations. Another perhaps similar measure to judge a story’s coherence
is consistency. Consistency can be with regards to the actions or events in the story.
For example if the husband loves his wife but then kills her, his actions are deemed
as inconsistent. Moreover sometimes we judge consistency of a story by comparing
the story to other stories we know that fall along the same line. If the story suddenly
63
differs drastically from a very similar precedent, it seems incoherent. Fay’s work
on story alignment and Krakauer’s work on story comparison become very valuable
in retrieving similar stories and discovering sudden inconsistencies. Additionally it
would be interesting to perform a human study on which stories are most coherent
and compare the results with the computational metrics suggested in this research.
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Chapter 6
Contributions
My purpose in undertaking the research reported in this thesis was to model aspects
of culturally determined biases in story understanding as reported by Morris and Peng
in their ground-breaking experiments with Chinese and American readers of murder
stories (1994). In the course of the research, I made the following contributions:
• Created the common sense rules needed to interpret the Morris-Peng murder
stories from culturally different perspectives, thus providing representative examples of common sense rules characterizing mental models of different cultural
actors.
• Determined a need for and implemented a mechanism for question-induced story
augmentation, enabling the answering of questions such as “Did Lu kill Shan
because America is individualistic.” This mechanism induces the reader to ask
if the reader believes the premise, inserts the premise into the story if so, and
finally looks for a causal chain connecting the premise and the conclusion.
• Determined the need for abduction rules, and with their addition to the Genesis
system, enabled the answering of questions such as “Did Lu kill Shan because
Lu is insane,” given the abductive rule, If person X kills person Y, then person
X must be insane.”
• Suggested and implemented computational metrics for story coherence.
65
66
Appendix A
Stories
A.1
Original Lu murder story
On October 31, a physics student at the University of Iowa shot a fellow student, several professors and several university employees and then shot himself. The murderer
Gag Lu, was a 38 year old male from Beijing, China. In 1985 Gang Lu had graduated from the Physics Department of Beijing University (the most elite university
in China) where he placed at the top of his class in examinations. He came to the
University of Iowa Physics department to pursue a Ph.D. and continued his academic
success by recording the highest score ever on the qualifying exam there. Gang Lu
was a bachelor and had few friends in Iowa. He spent most of his time alone. one
of his few extra-curricular activities was a gun club He bought a gun in 1990 and
practiced shooting it a a club. In 1991, he changed from a small gun to a powerful
.38 revolver.
Gang Lu’s research was highly regarded in the department. However at his dissertation defense in 1990, his committee did not pass him. Lu did not have a close
relationship with his advisor, Professor Geortz. After his unsuccessful defense, Gang
Lu was heard to say that he was so angry at his advisor that could kill him. IN his
second dissertation defense, Gang Lu passed and he got a Ph.D. in May 1991. He did
not get a job last year and took a job as a laboratory assistant.
Gang Lu ended up finishing his dissertation at the same time as a younger student
67
in the same research group named Linhua Shan. Shan, from a small village in china,
had graduated from the Chinese University of Science and Technology and come
to Iowa in 1987. Shan was married, socially active and had good relationships with
others in the department. He was also very successful, receiving several awards during
his studies and receiving the highest score on the qualifying exam his year (although
no breaking Lu’s record). The faculty in this research group had to decide which
of these two excellent students would be Iowa’s nominee for a national award. They
nominated Shan over Lu. Lu appealed this decision to the vice President for Academic
Affairs, but his appeal was rejected.
On October 31, Lu sent five letters to news media and friends and sent a package
to China. Then he went to the weekly meeting of his research group, carrying his gun.
According to witnesses, he shot his advisor, an associate professor and Shan. Then he
walked upstairs, who the apartment chairman and started to leave the building. One
of the dying professors cried out for help, and several propel form nearby offices came
to his assistance. Upon hearing this, Lu re-entered the room and told the people
to leave. Despite their please he shot the professor several more times. then Lu
walked across the entire campus to the Vice President’s office, gun in his hand. It
was snowing heavily, but Lu wore only a t-shirt. There he shot the Vice President
and a staff member. Then Lu shot himself.
A.2
Original McIlvane murder story
On November 14, a former employee at the Royal Oak Post Office shot three former
coworkers and then himself. The murderer, Thomas McIlvane, was a 31-year old
male from Michigan. He came from a family of Irish descent. McIlvane was raised
by his after a tough ex-Marine, after his mother ran off abandoning the family. Since
high school, McIlvane had trained in the martial arts and had won competitions.
He entered the US Marine Corp after high school, which took him to Japan and
California. He returned to Michigan in 1982 when his father died and started a
brief unsuccessful career as a professional kick-boer. Afterwards, he got a job as a
68
mail carrier at the Royal Oak post office. He was able to buy a house in a quiet
neighborhood where he lived alone. He was a quiet man with few friends but he was
well-liked by his neighbors. His activities were working out and hunting.
In the Royal Oak post office, relationships were strained between supervisors and
workers. May workers hard complained to their union, recently that supervisors had
harassed and intimidated them. Supervisors pursed workers to be more efficient and
disciplined workers over matters such as whether their uniforms fit right and where
they took their coffee breaks. When a union official complained that workers’ morale
was low, the supervisor said ”Morale’s not in my dictionary. ”
In the summer of 1990, McIlvane was fired from his job for swearing at his supervisors. He appealed this decision and his union caught the Postal Service for over a
year to restore his job. He worked part-time cleaning carpets. During this time, McIlvane made many telephone threats to his former supervisors. Over the past five years
there have been many publicized incidents of postal workers shooting their bosses.
In McIlvane’s threats he mentioned this incidents. For making these threats, he was
taken to court but acquitted. Witnesses said that his supervisor ridiculed McIlvane
when he fired him and laughed at thin again in the courtroom. On November 13,
1991 McIlvane learned that he had lost his appeal –he would not get his job back.
Workers who had heard rumors of McIlvane’s threats asked for security guards at the
post office but nothing was done.
On November 14, McIlvane entered the Royal Oak post office with a rifle. He
fired several rounds in a mail sorting area, then he headed toward the supervisor’s
office and shot the man who had fired him. Many terrified postal workers smashed
windows and escaped through them. McIlvane worked his way toward the personnel
office and shot the labor relations specialist who had handled his case. Then he went
upstairs and shot several other supervisors who were not involved in his case. Finally,
he walked back downstairs and host himself in the head.
A.3
Genesis Lu murder story
69
Lu i s a p e r s o n .
Shan i s a p e r s o n .
Geortz i s a p e r s o n .
America i s an e n t i t y .
America i s i n d i v i d u a l i s t i c .
America ’ s media g l o r i f i e s v i o l e n c e .
Lu i s a s t u d e n t .
Shan i s a s t u d e n t .
Lu i n h a b i t s America .
Lu f a i l s h i s d i s s e r t a t i o n d e f e n s e .
Goertz i s Lu ’ s a d v i s o r .
Goertz and Lu a r e not f r i e n d s .
Lu was angry a t Goertz b e c a u s e Lu f a i l e d h i s d i s s e r t a t i o n
defense .
Lu i s Chinese .
Lu went t o US t o do phD .
Lu had h i g h e s t e n t r a n c e exam s c o r e .
Lu i s a b a c h e l o r .
Lu i s l o n e l y .
Lu has a gun .
Lu p r a c t i c e s s h o o t i n g f o r fun .
Lu p a s s e s h i s second d i s s e r t a t i o n d e f e n s e .
Lu becomes a l a b a s s i s t a n t b e c a u s e Lu does not f i n d a j o b .
Shan i s younger than Lu .
70
Shan g r a d u a t e s with Lu .
Shan r e c e i v e d n a t i o n a l award .
Lu d i d not r e c e i v e n a t i o n a l award .
Lu c o n t e s t e d f a c u l t y d e c i s i o n b e c a u s e Lu di d not r e c e i v e
n a t i o n a l award .
F a c u l t y r e j e c t e d Lu ’ s a p p e a l .
Shan comes from a s m a l l Chinese v i l l a g e .
Shan i s married .
Shan i s s o c i a l .
Shan has f r i e n d s .
Shan i s s u c c e s s f u l .
Lu s h o o t s Goertz .
Lu s h o o t s an a s s o c i a t e p r o f e s s o r .
Lu s h o o t s Shan .
Lu s h o o t s h i m s e l f .
The end .
A.4
Genesis McIlvane murder story
S t a r t s t o r y t i t l e d ” McIlvane murder s t o r y ” .
McIlvane i s a p e r s o n .
McIlvan ’ s s u p e r v i s o r i s a p e r s o n .
McIlvane comes from Michigan .
McIlvane i s American .
McIlvane ’ s mother abandoned him .
McIlvane was r a i s e d by h i s f a t h e r .
71
McIlvan ’ s f a t h e r was a tough ex−Marine .
McIlvane won c o m p e t i t i o n s i n m a r t i a l −a r t s .
McIlvane e n t e r e d US Marine c o r p s .
A f t e r McIlvane ’ s f a t h e r died , McIlvane r e t u r n e d t o Michigan .
McIlvane f a i l e d a t k i c k −boxing so McIlvane worked a t th e p o s t
office .
McIlvane bought a house i n a q u i e t neighborhood .
McIlvane l i v e d a l o n e .
McIlvane was q u i e t .
McIlvane was mean .
McIlvane was l o n e l y .
McIlvane ’ s n e i g h b o r s l i k e d McIlvane .
McIlvane worked out .
McIlvane hunted .
S u p e r v i s o r s i n t i m i d a t e d and h a r a s s e d w o r k e r s a t t h e p o s t
office .
M i c I l v a n e swore a t h i s s u p e r v i s o r so McIlvane ’ s s u p e r v i s o r
f i r e d McIlvane .
McIlvane ’ s s u p e r v i s o r f i r e d McIlvane , so McIlvane c o n t e s t e d
the d e c i s i o n .
McIlvane t h r e a t e n e d s u p e r v i s o r s .
McIlvane ’ s s u p e r v i s o r r i d i c u l e d him .
McIlvane l o s e s h i s a p p e a l so McIlvane doesn ’ t r e s t o r e j o b .
McIlvane s h o t h i s s u p e r v i s o r .
McIlvane s h o t th e l a b o r r e l a t i o n s s p e c i a l i s t .
McIlvane s h o t o t h e r s u p e r v i s o r s .
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McIlvane s h o t h i m s e l f .
The end .
73
74
Appendix B
Commonsese rules
B.1
Eastern Commonsense Rules
S t a r t commonsense knowledge .
XX i s a p e r s o n .
YY i s a p e r s o n .
ZZ i s a p e r s o n .
SS i s an e n t i t y .
// c o r r u p t s o c i e t y
I f SS i s i n d i v i d u a l i s t i c then SS i s c o r r u p t .
I f XX i n h a b i t s SS and SS i s c o r r u p t , then XX becomes c o r r u p t .
// v i o l e n c e g l o r i f y i n g s o c i e t y .
I f XX i n h a b i t s SS and SS ’ s media g l o r i f i e s v i o l e n c e , then XX
becomes v i o l e n t .
// murderer p e r s o n a l i t y .
I f XX becomes c o r r u p t and XX becomes angry and XX f e e l s
75
d i s h o n o r e d then XX becomes murderous .
I f XX becomes v i o l e n t and XX becomes angry and XX f e e l s
d i s h o n o r e d then XX becomes murderous .
I f XX becomes angry and XX i s l o n e l y and XX f e e l s d i s h o n o r e d
then XX becomes murderous .
// s u i c i d a l p e r s o n a l i t y
I f XX i s l o n e l y and XX f e e l s f r u s t r a t e d then XX becomes
suicidal .
I f xx becomes s u i c i d a l then xx may k i l l xx
B.2
Western Commonsense Rules
S t a r t commonsense knowledge .
xx i s a p e r s o n .
yy i s a p e r s o n .
// s e l f −s e r v i n g b i a s by adding c l a u s e xx i s American . i n f e r
i n s a n i t y o n l y when c u l t u r e i s American .
I f xx i s n ’ t American and xx k i l l s yy then xx must be i n s a n e .
// accommodate s i t u a t i o n f o r w e s t e r n e r s . s e l f −s e r v i n g b i a s .
I f xx i s American and xx becomes angry , then xx becomes
violent .
I f xx becomes v i o l e n t , then xx may k i l l yy .
B.3
General Commonsense Rules
XX i s a p e r s o n .
YY i s a p e r s o n .
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// k i l l i n g and v i o l e n c e
I f XX s h o o t s YY, then XX k i l l s YY.
I f xx k i l l s yy , then xx i s v i o l e n t .
//harm
I f XX f i r e s YY, then XX harms YY.
I f XX r i d i c u l e s YY, then XX
harms YY.
I f XX k i l l YY then XX harms YY.
// s o c i a l s u c c e s s
I f YY i s s o c i a l and YY i s married and XX i s l o n e l y and YY i s
s i n g l e then YY i s more s u c c e s s f u l than XX.
// academic s u c c e s s
I f XX has h i g h e s t exam s c o r e then XX s u c c e e d s .
I f YY i s younger than XX and YY g r a d u a t e s with XX then YY i s
more s u c c e s s f u l than XX.
// academic honor
I f XX s u c c e e d s then XX f e e l s honored .
I f XX r e c e i v e s awards then XX f e e l s honored .
I f XX f a i l s d i s s e r t a t i o n d e f e n s e then XX f e e l s d i s h o n o r e d .
// academic v i c t i m
// I f XX i s a s t u d e n t and YY i s a s t u d e n t and XX f e e l s
d i s h o n o r e d and YY f e e l s honored then XX f e e l s v i c t i m i z e d .
<− d id not g e t p a r s e d .
I f XX i s a s t u d e n t and YY i s a s t u d e n t and YY r e c e i v e d
n a t i o n a l award and XX di d not r e c e i v e n a t i o n a l award and
77
XX c o n t e s t e d f a c u l t y d e c i s i o n then XX f e e l s v i c t i m i z e d .
I f XX had h i g h e s t e n t r a n c e exam s c o r e and XX f a i l s
d i s s e r t a t i o n d e f e n s e then XX f e e l s v i c t i m i z e d .
// academic f r u s t r a t i o n
// I f XX c o n t e s t e d f a c u l t y d e c i s i o n and f a c u l t y r e j e c t e d XX’ s
a p p e a l then XX f e e l s f r u s t r a t e d .<− f a i l e d
I f XX i s s t u d e n t and ZZ i s XX’ s a d v i s o r and ZZ a n g e r s XX then
ZZ f a i l s t o h e l p XX.
I f ZZ i s XX’ s a d v i s o r and ZZ f a i l s t o h e l p XX and f a c u l t y
r e j e c t s a p p e a l then XX f e e l s f r u s t r a t e d .
// p r o f e s s i o n a l f r u s t r a t i o n :
I f XX does not f i n d a j o b then XX f e e l s f r u s t r a t e d .
// envy
I f YY i s more s u c c e s s f u l than XX then XX e n v i e s YY.
// I f YY f e e l s honored and XX f e e l s d i s h o n o r e d then XX e n v i e s
YY. <− f a i l e d .
// s u i c i d a l p e r s o n a l i t y
I f XX i s l o n e l y and XX f e e l s f r u s t r a t e d then XX becomes
suicidal .
I f xx becomes s u i c i d a l then xx may k i l l xx .
// murderer p e r s o n a l i t y with a weapon .
I f XX becomes murderous and XX has a gun then XX may s h o o t YY
.
// murderer may k i l l
78
I f XX i s a murderer then XX may k i l l YY.
79
80
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