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Five studies examined Kahneman and Miller's (1986) hypothesis that events become more "normal" and generate weaker reactions the more strongly they evoke representations of similar events. In each study, Ss were presented with 1 of 2 versions of a scenario that described the occurrence of an improbable event. The scenarios equated the a priori probability of the target event, but manipulated the ease of mentally simulating the event by varying the absolute number of similar events in the population. Depending on the study, Ss were asked to indicate whether they thought the event was due to chance as opposed to (a) an illegitimate action on the part of the benefited protagonist, or (b) the intentional or unintentional misrepresentation of the probability of the event. As predicted, the fewer ways the events could have occurred by chance, the less inclined Ss were to assume that the low-probability event occurred by chance. The implications of these findings for impression-management dynamics and stereotype revision are discussed.Reactions to events depend not only on the events themselves, but on what the events bring to mind (Kahneman & Miller, 1986;Kahneman & Tversky, 1982b). The thoughts, images, and scenarios evoked by an event constitute what Kahneman and Miller (1986) have termed the event's norm. Events that elicit representations that are primarily similar to them are said to be normal, whereas events that elicit representations that are primarily dissimilar to them are said to be abnormal. The norms evoked by events include expectancies about events, with the consequence that events that disconfirm expectancies are judged to be less normal than events that confirm expectancies. Norms, however, are not only based on retrieved representations of what was expected to be, but also on constructed representations of what might have been. Kahneman and Miller used the term postcomputedio describe post hoc counterfactual representations that are generated by the events themselves, and distinguished this class of representations from precomputed representations such as expectancies.Evidence for the role of postcomputed representations in the This research was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grants awarded to Dale T. Miller and to Cathy McFarland and William Turnbull.This article profited from the helpful comments of Gary Wells and two anonymous reviewers and valuable discussions with Geoif

The present paper is concerned with the knowledge or cognitive representations which individuals must possess in order to understand utterances occurring in conversations. We examined Brown and Levinson's (1978) model which reconciles the Cooperative Principle of Grice (1975) with the face-wants of conversational interactants by relativising the operation of abstract principles of conversation to aspects of the social relationship between the speaker and hearer. In an empirical study of ironic sarcasm and banter, Brown and Levinson's model is found to require an additional relationship parameter, ‘relationship affect’, to account for the ways in which neutral observers interpret counter-to-fact insults and compliments. As predicted, the literal meanings of utterances are also found to influence observers' cognitive representations of the relationship between speaker and hearer. However, unexpected correlations among the relationship variables suggest that the model's additivity assumption may need to be relinquished.