verblinding

Verblinding is a term used in discourse analysis to describe the tendency of verb choice to shape readers’ perception of events and responsibility. It refers to how verb aspect, voice, and the strength of action words influence impressions, sometimes biasing judgments about causality or intent.

Mechanism: Verbs encode action, agency, and temporality. Active voice tends to attribute agency and intentionality; passive voice or nominalizations can reduce perceived agency, while strong, concrete verbs convey immediacy and severity. The effect arises when readers infer facts from verb use, not just from explicit content.

Examples: "The city was destroyed" versus "We destroyed the city" illustrate how verb choice shifts perceived responsibility. "The market collapsed after a sudden shock" can imply external causality differently than "The market collapsed" by foregrounding forces or agents through the verbs chosen.

Contexts: Verblinding can appear in journalism, political rhetoric, marketing, and legal writing, where concise or vivid verbs influence interpretation. It may be used deliberately to emphasize action or outcomes, or arise unintentionally from stylistic conventions and genre norms.

Assessment: Verblinding is not a formal cognitive bias in major psychology taxonomies, but it intersects framing effects, agency attribution, and narrative persuasion. Researchers examine how verb strength, voice, and grammatical structure affect judgments and perceived causality.

Criticism: Isolating verb effects from broader framing is challenging, and some scholars caution against overgeneralizing from stylistic cues to cognitive states. The concept remains debated and is more often discussed as a descriptive lens than as a standalone mechanism.

See also: framing effect, linguistic relativity, agency bias, narrative persuasion.