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Four studies demonstrated that explanations of interpersonal experiences generally conform to three principles: (a) Implicit causality-Explanations should refer to the stimulus person rather than the experiencing person; (b) cognitive balance-Something positive should be said if the experience is positive and something negative should be said if the experience is negative; and (c) imbalance repair-supplementary statements designed to correct unsatisfactory explanations should be proportional to the size of the original imbalance. Whereas previous investigations of these principles have typically examined artificial sentences that do not make reference to real events, these 4 studies showed that the principles of implicit causality and cognitive balance also apply to reference-making statements believed to be true by the person composing them. The high levels of implicit causality and balance in such statements do not necessarily imply equally high levels for events in the world, but may be attributable to selection and interpretation biases (during encoding, recall, or both) that favor prototypical instances. Ss relied somewhat on the descriptive meaning of words and sentences, but the 3 principles contributed a great deal to denning satisfactory explanations.The following conversation between a son at college and a mother at home is imaginary and, at two points, improbable.Son: "To begin with, Erika bores Bill because he is-" Mother: "Because he is? What about her? I thought it was Erika that-" Son: "Right, I meant to say she. Erika bores Bill because she is a totally happy, optimistic person." Mother: "Well then I don't get it. How do you figure Bill? It's nice to be around someone happy and optimistic." Son: "Except Bill takes the tragic view of life." Mother: "Oh. Find some new friends, dear." Preparation of this article was supported in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship held by Michael H. Van Kleeck.We thank Robert Rosenthal for statistical advice and Lynn Hillger and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

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