Much current work in attribution theory presumes that in multicausal situations, naive attributions are often characterized by the multiple sufficient causal scheme. The present research was designed to examine whether the multiple sufficient scheme or an alternate model, the variant-effect scheme, better characterizes naive attributions. The variant-effect scheme is a generalization of Kelley's graded-effects scheme and, in contrast to the multiple sufficient scheme, reflects a belief in the conservation of causal energy. Five-to 12-yearolds received a series of social inference problems. In each problem, subjects gave base-rate estimates of an event and also made attributions of the likelihood that the event occurred after hearing that a related effect occurred in the presence of another cause. Three critical tests consistently disconfirmed use of the multiple sufficient scheme and supported use of the variant-effect scheme. The results further indicated increasing use of the variant-effect scheme with development. Preference for a variant-effect scheme over a multiple sufficient scheme suggests a picture of a naive attributor who is perceptually sophisticated but operationally naive-accepting causal simplicity rather than entertaining the possibility of causal indeterminacy.

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