The role of causal sequence in the meaning of actions

Single actions, taken out of context, typically have numerous meanings. Yet, when we observe such actions as part of a sequence of behaviour, we are often unaware of this multiplicity of possible meanings. In this article, we argue that the specific meaning of an action is the result of a process in which people, by making appropriate inferences, relate the actions in a sequence to each other and construct a coherent scenario from them. One implication of this position is that the meaning of actions should be extremely sensitive to the order in which they occur, since order affects which knowledge structures are currently active and is an important clue to the causal and means-end relations among actions. In fact, meaning should be so sensitive to order that it should be possible to construct sets of actions, such that merely by changing the order, the same set of actions could have two radically different meanings. Five sets of such actions were designed. Subjects read one of the two orders for each set of actions and then answered a number of open-ended questions about them. Subjects receiving different orders identified different causes and reasons for the actions, made different predictions about what would happen next, and came to different conclusions about the identities of actors and and objects in the sequences, thus indicating that they had constructed very different meanings for the same actions.