Cognitive processing of causal explanations: a sociocognitive perspective

• Published in: European journal of social psychology Vol. 29; no. 5-6; pp. 673 - 690
• Main Authors: Channouf, Ahmed, Py, Jacques, Somat, Alain
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.08.1999; Wiley
• Subjects: Adults; Attribution; Biological and medical sciences; Causal attributions; Causality; Child psychology; Children; Cognition; Cognitive processing; College Students; Explanation; France; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Information Processing; Memory; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Social attribution, perception and cognition; Social cognition; Social Influence; Social psychology; Social values; Human; Social norm; Semantic memory; Information processing; Causality; Categorization; Attribution; Social cognition
• ISSN: 0046-2772; 1099-0992
• DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0992(199908/09)29:5/6<673::AID-EJSP956>3.0.CO;2-P

This article is aimed at providing further supporting evidence for the assumption that the cognitive processing of certain kinds of information is socially driven, even at very low levels of processing. More specifically, we hypothesize that knowledge associated with a social norm like the norm of internality (Jellison & Green, 1981; Beauvois & Dubois, 1988) may be more accessible in memory than knowledge associated with a non‐normative register, and may therefore be processed more easily. Experiment 1 shows that adults in a cognitive overload situation who were presented either with internal attribution statements (normative) or with external attribution statements (non‐normative) managed to recall some of the former, but proved incapable of recalling any of the latter. Experiment 2 allows us to show that 10‐ and 11‐year‐old children (age at which the norm of internality is being acquired) in an analogous situation were not able to process internal attribution statements unless they were pre‐trained to detect the value associated with normative causal explanations. Experiment 3 enables us to verify that training adults in this way did not change the conclusions drawn in Experiment 1. The results as a whole are discussed in terms of the potential storage in semantic memory of the social value associated with normative explanations. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.