Causal Attribution and Perceived Realism of Stories

Abstract

Just as people generate causal explanations for social events around them, story readers usually generate inferences about causality of events when reading a story. The attribution literature suggests that, when judging events that happen to others, people spontaneously generate dispositional explanations for negative events and situational explanations for positive events and the reverse when judging events that happen to themselves. Three experiments examined how these spontaneously generated inferences of causality interacted with causal explanations provided by the text of a story to influence perceived realism. The results indicate that the relationship between spontaneously generated causal attributions and information supplied by the story had little influence on realism judgments about story characters or about other people. When evaluating the story scenario for the self, however, results of all three experiments show that people find information consistent with their own spontaneous attributions more realistic. The results contribute to our understanding of the psychological processes that may drive realism evaluations of stories and possible contrasting mechanisms between attributions in story worlds and the social world.

Notes

1. The initial story-generation topics were: Mark and Betty are in the process of getting a divorce. Tom is getting fired from his job. Jane began to gain a large amount of weight. Nancy recently got into a bad car accident. Bill breaks his arm. Jaime failed her biology class. The four topics in italics were the ones used in the experiment.

2. Complete Story Orders: Order 1 (Barber PS, Electrician DN, Writer NS, Deliveryman PD); Order 2 (Electrician NS, Barber PD, Deliveryman ND, Writer PS); Order 3 (Writer ND, Deliveryman PS, Barber PD, Electrician NS); Order 4 (Deliveryman PD, Writer NS, Electrician PS, Barber ND). P = Positive, N = Negative; D = Dispositional, S = Situational.

3. A reviewer suggested another more complex alternative hypothesis for the results of Experiment 1 based on Lang's limited capacity model, namely that processing atypical stories may exceed the available resources and affect processing of the story. In such situations a reader's default value may be that the story is realistic. However, capacity limits may not be relevant since readers were able to take as long as they wanted to read the stories, but we do not have any basis in the data to rule out the possibility and it is consistent with the significant interaction in Experiment 1. The idea is certainly interesting enough to merit testing in the future.