Enough said: Three principles of explanation.

Abstract

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.

To do or not to do? A cognitive consistency model for drawing conclusions from conditional instructions and advice

“…This raises important questions for theories of language and reasoning, as only the consistency theory is able to explain why people will draw a positive conclusion in one case and a negative conclusion in another case, even though both cases appear to convey the same expected utility of doing the consequent given the antecedent. Our results complement findings on causal explanation which demonstrate the operation of polarity (Majid, Sanford, & Pickering, 2006) and balance (Brown & van Kleeck, 1989;Rudolph & von Hecker, 2006), suggesting that the consistency approach can provide general organising principles to subsume a range of linguistic and world knowledge effects in reasoning.…”

“…Existing research confirms that causal world knowledge plays a role in making a sentence seem normal or "bizarre". Thus research (Brown & van Kleeck, 1989;Rudolph & von Hecker, 2006) has shown that people judge "imbalanced" sentences such as John admires Mary because she is so arrogant as more "bizarre" than balanced sentences such as John admires Mary because she is so friendly. This can be interpreted as a sentence directionality effect insofar as a positive emotion (admiration) should normally be evoked by a positive quality (e.g., friendliness).…”

Spatial representation of coherence.

“…We interpret this as the balanced triads "making sense" more than unbalanced trials and therefore seeming more coherent than unbalanced triads (see Brown & van Kleeck, 1989;Crandall, Silvia, N'Gbala, Tsang, & Dawson, 2007;Rudolph & von Hecker, 2006) which, in turn, translated into greater 'proximity', that is, the constituent elements within balanced triads showed shorter distances between each other than the constituent elements within unbalanced triads. In terms of the SDT analysis, this main result corresponds to finding stronger response tendencies in the no fit direction for balanced than unbalanced relations, independent of how well the objective fit and no fit could be discriminated for balanced versus unbalanced materials.…”

“…we know from earlier research that participants usually perceive balanced social triads as making more sense than unbalanced (Brown & Van Kleeck, 1989;Crandall et al, 2007;Rudolph & von Hecker, 2006), whereas in the syllogism case (Experiments 2a and 2b) participants were given formal training to evaluate categorical syllogisms and were asked to think about the validity of each syllogism immediately prior to the spatial task, and immediately afterwards to make a judgment on validity (which was reasonably accurate on average, see Table 4). Finally, in the latent causality case coherence is thought to be achieved by a participant's own, schema-guided, re-constructive activity (see Bartlett, 1932).…”

“…Using a variety of different paradigms, balanced patterns of social relations such as triads have repeatedly been found to be learned more easily than unbalanced patterns (Crockett, 1982;DeSoto, 1960;Picek, Sherman, & Shiffrin, 1975;Press, Crockett, & Rosenkrantz, 1969;Zajonc & Burnstein, 1965). Previous research has also repeatedly found that balanced social triads are perceived as making more sense, and, conversely, unbalanced triads are seen as more in need of additional explanations for them to make sense (Brown & van Kleeck, 1989;Crandall, Silvia, N'Gbala, Tsang, & Dawson, 2007;Rudolph & von Hecker, 2006). In the present context, we therefore assume that balanced triads would be seen as more coherent than unbalanced triads.…”