Generating explanations of social and nonsocial events

Abstract

Thirty-six undergraduates generated explanations for five social events (e.g., “A patron leaves a small tip in a restaurant”) and five nonsocial events (e.g., “A block of a main city street has been closed to traffic”). The number of distinct explanations, the number of different types of explanations, the originality and elaboration of the explanations, and the systematicity of generating explanations were scored. Initial results suggested more thoughtful and less stereotypic performance when the subjects generated explanations for social events than for nonsocial events. Later analyses showed that many of these results depended on the particular stimulus items. Measures for describing and evaluating reasoning in everyday contexts are discussed.