Copyright 1984 by the
American Psychological Association, Inc.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
1984, Vol. 46, No. 1,44-56
Causes and Effects of Causal Attribution
Reid Hastie
Northwestern University
What types of events instigate causal reasoning and what effects does causal reasoning
have on the subsequent use of information stored in memory? Three experiments
are reported that address these questions. The essential conclusions of the research
are that unexpected events elicit causal reasoning and that causal reasoning produces
relatively elaborate memory representations of these events. When subjects reason
about why events occurred, they are more likely to remember those events than
events that did not elicit causal reasoning. The implications of these findings for
theories of causal reasoning and social memory are discussed.
Figure 1 is a heuristic summary of the attribution process that serves as an organizational structure for research studying the
question, "When do we ask why?" Four types
of conditions that elicit attributions have been
studied: the asking of a "why" question, the
occurrence of events that are unexpected by
the perceiver, the dependence of the perceiver
on others for hedonically relevant outcomes,
and the perceiver's own failure to perform a
well-defined task satisfactorily.
Enzle and Schopflocher (1978) demonstrated that an instruction to evaluate an actor's dispositional qualities produced attributional reasoning that did not occur as frequently when such an instruction was not put
to the subject. The critical dependent variable
in this research was a rating of an actor's attractiveness at the end of an experimental session. Subjects who did not make the earlier
dispositional evaluation were not sensitive to
information about the actor's disposition.
Thus, the authors concluded that subjects only
performed attributional reasoning when requested to (implicitly) by the experimenter.
Several studies support the conclusion that
unexpected events instigate attributional processing. Pyszczynski and Greenberg (1981) and
Wong and Weiner (1981) showed that a subject's information-seeking responses were oriented toward explanation-relevant information
when unexpected events occurred. This tendency to seek explanation-relevant information was relatively weaker when events were
expected. Lau and Russell (1980) found thart
sports writers were likelier to engage in explanatory analyses when the outcome of a
When we perceive events we are almost irresistibly drawn to seek their sources or causes.
This tendency is especially strong when the
events are the actions of other people (Heider,
1958;Schank&Abelson, 1977;Zajonc, 1980).
But, although this tendency is strong and pervasive, it is not inevitable. Psychologists have
studied countless stimulus events that do not
elicit causal reasoning: light flashes, visual
patterns, acoustic tones, lists of common English words, and so on, including virtually all
of the conventional experimental laboratory
materials. Even social events do not inevitably
elicit causal attribution. Some commentators
(Manis, 1977) have claimed that the emphasis
on attribution processes in recent social psychology is exaggerated. And, of course, most
of the interesting literature in Western civilization would be reduced to boring chronicles
if protagonists were in the habit of constant
attribution. Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Lear, and
Richard of Gloucester might all have ended
their plays in good health had they paused
more often to wonder why.
The point is obvious: Sometimes we engage
in extensive causal reasoning, and sometimes
we do not. The critical question is, under what
conditions do we attempt to explain why an
act has occurred?
The author would like to thank Joan Dobrof, John
Porter, and Barbara Signer for their assistance conducting
the research.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Reid Hastie,
Psychology Department, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201.
44
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTION
sports event was unexpected as compared to
when it was expected. Clary and Tesser (in
press) asked subjects to retell stories in which
a protagonist acted in a manner inconsistent
with one of his personal characteristics. A
content analysis of the subjects' retellings of
the stories found that they tended to spontaneously supply explanations for the characterdiscrepant actions.
Dependence on another person for desired
outcomes appears to instigate causal reasoning.
Berscheid, Graziano, Monson, and Dermer
(1976) found that men and women who were
about to go out on a date with a stranger were
likelier to engage in causal reasoning about
the stranger's disposition than were subjects
who did not expect to date the stranger. The
dependent variables in this research included
measures of attention focus, recall and recognition, and extremity of dispositional trait
ratings. All of these measures were sensitive
to the date^-nondate independent variable manipulation in a manner that was consistent
with the conclusion that causal reasoning is
likelier to occur when one is dependent on
another.
Harvey, Yarkin, Lightner, and Town (1980)
varied the extent to which the observer of a
conversation empathized with the individuals
conversing or took a detached role while observing the conversationalists. They found that
the number of attributions that appeared in
45
observers' written reports summarizing the
conversation was affected by their role; empathizing observers included more attributions
in their reports than did detached observers.
These researchers also found that recall for
information from the conversations was higher
for observers who took the empathetic role
than for detached observers. The results were
interpreted as evidence that the empathetic set
stimulated subjects to become involved and
to try to understand the causes of the events
they observed in the conversations. Observers'
efforts to understand the events led them to
wonder why they occurred. This interpretation
is closely analogous to the suggestion that hedonic relevance or outcome dependency will
stimulate subjects to reason causally about
outcome-relevant events.
A recent article by Monson, Keel, Stephens,
and Genung (1982) is also consistent with the
general notion that hedonic relevance or outcome dependency affects the nature of causal
reasoning about another person's actions.
These researchers found that when subjects
anticipated future interaction with another
person, their attributions tended to be more
valid, or at least dependent on the available
causally relevant information, than when future interaction was not anticipated.
Wong and Weiner (1981) and Diener and
Dweck (1978) provide evidence that when a
subject fails a task (typically an academic
EXPLICIT
QUESTION i
UNEXPECTED/
EVENT
OUTCOME
IDEPENDENCY/
TASK
FAILURE
Figure ]. Hypothetical sequence of conditions and processing stages that are involved in causal reasoning.
46
REID HASTIE
achievement task) he or she is likelier to engage
in attributional reasoning to explain the failure
than when he or she does not fail. Wong and
Weiner used information-seeking measures
(requests for additional information) in the
context of a role-play study, whereas Diener
and Dweck used a concurrent talk-aloud procedure to study what was on their primary
school subjects' minds while performing an
academic task.
Figure 1 can also help us organize the empirical research according to the substages of
the attribution process that are referenced by
dependent variable measures in each study.
The Wong and Weiner (1981) and Pyszczynski
and Greenberg (1981) experiments attempted
to tap the attention and information-seeking
substage of the process. The other studies focused on the products of the attribution process studying disposition trait ratings of actors
or the summary of attributional reasoning in
a newspaper article. The Diener and Dweck
(1978) study is difficult to classify, but their
measures of attribution contents in talk-aloud
protocols were counts of the number of attribution conclusions that each subject reached.
Thus, their measure also captures a product
of the entire process.
Figure 1 indicates tha^ the products of attribution will be stored in long-term memory
some of the time. Smith and Miller (1979) and
Hastie (1980) have suggested that memory
traces may provide information concerning
attribution processes. Smith and Miller suggested that responses to questions concerning
the causes of the behavior would be answered
more quickly if a proposition summarizing
attribution for the product had been previously
stored in memory as compared to an answer
based on mental computation at the time the
question was presented. Smith and Miller
(1979) and Sherman and Titus (1982) have
reported empirical results that support the
notion that causal attribution does frequently
occur during normal comprehension processes. These researchers also hypothesized
that the product of this causal reasoning, inferences about causes and future effects, would
be stored in memory representations along
with the original stimulus information.
A number of researchers including Harvey
et al. (1980), Sherman and Titus (1982), Bower
and Masling (1980), Stevenson (1981), Fisher
and Craik (1980), Bradshaw and Anderson
(1982), and Black and Bern (1981) have all
hypothesized that causally significant propositions will be highly elaborated when stored
in memory with other related event information. Black and Bower (1980) and Graesser,
Robertson, Lovelace, and Swinehart (1980)
have suggested that information about plans
and goals will tend to be stored in relatively
superordinate locations within general hierarchical knowledge structures used to encode
narrative information. Uncompleted plans involving blocked goals will not be accorded such
priority in mental storage structures, and they
will be relatively poorly remembered compared to information directly relevant to completed plans. Crocker, Binns, and Weber (1983)
have suggested that the type of causal attribution that is provided for an act will determine whether or not the act is well remembered. Their suggestion, supported by their
empirical results, was that an unexpected act
would be relatively well remembered, but only
if it was explained with reference to causal
information about the actor. On the other
hand, if the unexpected action was explained
with reference to the situation in which it occurred, it was not better remembered than an
expected act.
Hastie (1980) has suggested that attribution
processes involve information seeking both in
the environment and in memory. He suggested
that the review of relevant information in
memory would also produce associative links
between new information (e.g., an unexpected
action by an actor) and old information already stored in memory (e.g., past actions of
the actor). Thus, causal reasoning would produce relatively richly linked constellations of
memory traces concerning an individual or
event that was central in the attribution process.
Experiment 1 in the present study attempts
to test three hypotheses. A direct measure of
attributional processing at the time an event
is perceived is used to measure the occurrence
of attributional thinking, and two hypotheses
concerning the conditions instigating attribution will be tested: (a) Unexpected or incongruent actions of an actor are likelier to
elicit attributional processing than expected
or congruent actions of the actor, (b) Socially
unacceptable, evaluatively negative actions of
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTION
an actor will elicit attributional processing to
a greater extent than socially acceptable actions. The effect of attributional processing on
memory for information about an actor will
be studied by asking subjects, at the end of
the experimental session, to recall all the information that has been presented about each
actor. The third hypothesis under test is that
events that receive attributional processing at
acquisition will be better recalled than events
that do not elicit causal reasoning.
Experiment 1
Method
Overview. Subjects were shown descriptions of behaviors performed by hypothetical characters. For each phrase
describing a behavior, the subject was asked to write a
short continuation of the phrase in his or her own words.
Subjects had been informed that the continuation task
was part of a study of grammatical usage in extemporaneous writing. After performing the continuation task for
several characters, the subjects were surprised by a request
to recall as many of the behavior description phrases as
a they could remember. A measure of subjects' likelihood
II of attempting to explain an action was obtained by having
if judges rate the subjects' written continuations for explan/1 atory content. Memory measures were obtained from the
'I recall task.
Subjects. The subjects were 24 undergraduate university students. They were paid $1.50 each for their participation in the experiment. Approximately equal numbers
of male and female subjects participated in all of the research reported in this article. In no case was there a
statistically reliable effect of the sex variable on measures
of memory or on the causal attribution measure.
Design. Each subject studied, wrote continuation
phrases,.and recalled sentences from six lists. Each list
contained behavior descriptions that were attributed to a
single hypothetical character. Three list lengths were studied, a three-description list, a six-description list, and a
nine-description list, and subjects saw two lists of each
length. Each list was associated with a personality trait
adjective (e.g., friendly, intelligent, dishonest), md within
each list two thirds of the behavior descriptions were congruent with the trait adjective and one third were incongruent. One half of the lists were associated with a congruent personality trait that was evaluatively positive or
good, the other half with a trait that was evaluatively negative or bad. Twelve personality traits were used to construct
the lists and this set was divided into two six-trait sets
creating two replications Of a basic experimental design.
Within each replication, congruent traits (lists) were paired
with each of the three possible list lengths (three items,
six items, or nine items). This created three sets of List
Length X Congruent Trait Pairings (defined by six-description trait sets) within each of the two replications.
Within each list-length/congruent-trait cell of the design
four subjects studied lists from that cell; the order of presentation of the lists for each subject was scrambled at
random. Thus, there were three between-subjects factors
47
in the experimental design: replication (two levels), listlength/congruent-trait pairings (three levels), and list order
(nested within pairing, four levels). The within-subject design also included three factors: trait valence (good vs.
bad), list length (three, six, or nine items), and item type
(congruent vs. incongruent). Furthermore, care was taken
to see that each item type occurred equally often in all
possible serial positions within a list,
Materials. The experimental plan required sets of sentences describing behaviors characteristic of a representative sample of personality traits. Twelve traits were chosen
from the 80 traits studied by Rosenberg and Sedlak (1972)
in their multidimensional scaling analysis. These 12 traits
were combined to form six pairs of "opposite-meaning"
traits: intelligent-unintelligent, honest-liar, conscientiousirresponsible, friendly-hostile, shy-aggressive, and naivecynical. The pairs were presented to 12 pretest subjects
with an instruction of the form, "consider a person who
is very intelligent; you would expect to see him (her). . ."
The resulting lists of pretest subject-generated behaviors
were edited to yield three- to five-word behavior descriptions for each of the traits. Some examples of behaviors
generated as congruent with the intelligent trait are "won
the chess tournament" and "attended the symphony concert." All behavior descriptions were written to describe
specific, easy-to-picture events. Each list of behaviors associated- with a trait included two-thirds congruent behaviors and one-third incongruent behaviors. Incongruent
behaviors for each list were selected by sampling from the
set of behaviors associated with the trait opposite in meaning to the trait for the congruent behaviors. Thus, for
example, incongruent behaviors for the intelligent trait
were selected to be congruent with the unintelligent trait.
The list-generation plan counterbalanced congruent and
incongruent traits, thus providing a control for idiosyncratic
characteristics of particular trait-related sentences. Congruent sentences for one character were presented as incongruent sentences for other characters to subjects in the
other replication of the between-subjects design.
Procedure. Experimental sessions lasted approximately
40 min. Subjects were tested in groups of from two to five
participants. They were instructed that the experiment
was part of a research program studying psycholinguistics.
Their task would be to generate extemporaneous continuations of short phrases that would be, analyzed to determine their grammatical structures. They were also instructed that the written materials would be comprised
of sentences describing behaviors of a series of hypothetical
characters and that they were to attempt to form a clear
personality impression of each character before spontaneously generating a sentence continuation for each behavior description. The instructions indicated that, just as
in real life, the characters described by the experimental
sentences might not be perfectly consistent. However, the
subjects' task was to attempt to form as clear an impression
as possible and then to write the continuations.
When each of the six lists of sentences was presented,
subjects were instructed to perform two tasks: (a) read
through the set of three, six, or nine sentences to form
an impression of the character, and (b) write a short continuation of each sentence starting with the first sentence
and proceeding through the end of the list. The experimenter paced subjects through these two tasks by in-,
strutting them when to read all descriptions to form an
impression (30 s) and when to write each sentence con-
48
REID HASTIE
tinuation (20 s per sentence). Each list was presented on
a single page of a six-page booklet and included a linedrawn portrait of the hypothetical character, the character's
name (selected from a list of six common male American
names), and an occupation label (e.g., attorney, engineer),
as well as the list of sentences, each followed by a space
for the subject's continuation.
After completing the sentence continuation task for each
of the six characters, the subject was given another booklet
of six pages and each page was headed with one character's
name, picture, and occupation label. At this time, subjects
were instructed to recall as many of the sentence descriptions as they could in any order in which they occurred
to them. They were to write these sentences on the appropriate recall page for each character. Subjects were given
18 min to perform the recall task. When the recall task
was concluded subjects were debriefed, paid, and dismissed
from the experiment.
Results
The results will be presented in three parts:
analyses of data summarizing the contents of
subjects' written continuations of behavior description phrases, data summarizing subjects'
recall performance, and statistics summarizing
the relationship between recall and continuation measures.
Sentence continuation contents.. Subjects'
written continuations averaged seven words in
length. Less than 2% of the continuations were
missing or illegible and no continuations included more than one explanation. Judges,
comparable in age and background to the subjects, read the written continuations of each
behavior description and classified each continuation into one of three coding categories:
(a) An explanation answered the question,
"Why was the act performed?" (b) An elaboration answered the question, "What were
the circumstances when the act occurred?" (c)
A temporal succession answered the question,
"What happened after the act occurred?" The
judges were further instructed that when they
were uncertain as to whether an action was
or was not an explanation, they should classify
it as an explanation. If their uncertainty concerned classification in the elaboration or
temporal succession categories they were to
call it an elaboration.
The three types of continuations did not
differ reliably in length. If we consider the behavior description, "won the chess tournament," we can see examples of each of the
three types of continuation: explanation, ". . .
because he had studied the game for five
years"; elaboration, ". . . in the YMCA
gameroom"; and temporal succession, ". . .
and celebrated his victory with his girlfriend."
Agreement among the three judges who performed the coding task was high, with percent
agreement statistics all above 80%. Initial efforts to make fine discriminations among types
of attributions (person vs. situation) or explanations (causal antecedent, goal orientation,
etc.; see Lehnert, 1978) appearing in subjects'
continuations were thwarted by relatively low
levels of interrater agreement.
Overall, 24% of the continuations were classified as explanations, 69% as elaborations, and
7% as temporal successions. The focus of the
present theoretical analysis was on the probability that a behavior description would be
continued with an explanation. The proportion of descriptions continued by explanations
is the dependent variable in Figure 2. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that only one
effect reached conventional levels of statistical
significance; this was a test of the difference
between proportion explained for congruent
versus incongruent items, F( 1,18) = 8.12, p <
.01, MSe = . 131. An incongruent act was likelier to elicit an explanation as a continuation
than was a congruent act (18 of the 24 subjects
were likelier to continue an incongruent item
with an explanation as compared with a congruent item). This finding is consistent with
findings obtained by Wong and Weiner (1981),
Pyszczynski and Greenberg (1981), and Lau
and Russell (1980).
Recall performance. Subjects had been instructed to recall the behavior descriptions
presented by the experimenter (not their own
continuations of those phrases). First, a lenient
scoring criterion was employed: An item was
scored as correctly recalled if the general sense
of the description was preserved (i.e., any
changes from the original were substitutions
of synonymous words). The data to be reported
in this article were tabulated following this
criterion. Second, a strict scoring criterion was
adopted: An item was scored as correctly recalled if it differed from the original in at most
one important word (and if this deviation did
not affect the meaning of the phrase). Analyses
were repeated with this criterion, and the general pattern of the results remained the same
as for the lenient criterion. However, application of the strict criterion resulted in very
49
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTION
low memory performance; frequently the
overall proportion recalled for a cell in the
experimental design fell below. 10. Thus, some
of the effects of independent variable factors
were no longer significant in an analysis on
the strict recall criterion data.
The proportions of behavior descriptions
recalled are displayed in Figure 2, broken down
by list length (three-, six-, or nine-item lists),
good or bad evaluation of the congruent trait,
and congruent or incongruent item within the
list. Overall, the relevant analyses reproduce
effects reported in earlier work on person
memory. There is a significant difference between the proportions of congruent and incongruent items recalled, with congruent items
being recalled at a lower level than incongruent
items, F(\, 18) = 11.38,p< .003, MS; = .650
(19 of the 24 subjects recalled a greater proportion of incongruent than congruent items).
This effect is a replication of similar effects
reported by Hastie and Kumar (1979), Srull
(1981), and others. Incongruent item recall
tended to be higher than congruent item recall
when set sizes were unequal such that incon-
gruent items were less frequent than congruent
items (as they were in all of the present experimental materials).
There is a second effect of list length such
that items are likelier to be recalled if they
were presented in shorter lists than if they were
presented in longer lists, F(2, 36) = 4.98, p <
.01, MSe = .109. This result is probably also
best interpreted as a set size or list length effect
familiar from research on verbal learning
(Murdock, 1960;Tulving&Pearlstone, 1966).
A final effect of theoretical interest, the
comparison between recall for behaviors attributed to a good person and behaviors attributed to a bad person did not reach conventional levels of statistical significance, F(l,
18) = 1.68, ns, MSe = .215. A further exploration of the good-bad difference examined
the relative recall of behavior descriptions of
bad acts as compared to good acts. This compared, for example, congruent acts attributed
to a good character and incongruent acts attributed to a bad character (both good acts)
with congruent acts attributed to a bad character and incongruent acts attributed to a good
.40
,10
s
3
,30
,30
,20
,20
2
§
a.
T
2/1
1/2
T
6/3
2/1
4/2
6/3
LIST TYPE
( NO. CONGRUENT ACTS / NO, INCONGRUENT ACTS )
Figure 2. Recall memory and sentence continuation task results from Experiment 1. (Open circles represent
results for incongruent items and filled circles for congruent items.)
50
REID HASTIE
character (both bad acts). This comparison of
good to bad behavior descriptions (.32 vs. .29
proportions of acts recalled, respectively) also
failed to reveal a reliable good-bad difference.
Relationship between recall and explanation.
We have now demonstrated an effect of expectedness of information on both recall of
the information and attributional reasoning
concerning the information. Hastie (1980; see
also Hastie & Kumar, 1979) has suggested that
there is a causal relationship between attributional processing and memory for information. One condition for the truth of the
hypothesis that causal attribution has a causal
influence on memory for information is that
there be a correlation between the memory
and attribution measures in the present experiment. To test this hypothesis a correlational index, the phi-coefficient (Siegel, 1956),
was calculated for each list for each subject in
the experiment (six phi-coefficients per subject). Within a list, each behavior description
was classified into a four-cell matrix with explained/not explained and recalled/not recalled as marginal categories. Thus, the phicoefficient summarized the correlational relationship between explanation and recall for
each list. These phi-coefficients were entered
as the dependent variable in an ANOVA to determine whether the coefficient was significantly different from zero. Although the overall
average for the phi-coefficient was small in
magnitude (+.15), it was significantly different
from zero, F(l, 18) = 17.56, p < .001, MS"e =
.02. None of the independent variables in the
experimental design had a statistically significant effect on the phi-coefficient measure.
In summary, Experiment 1 has yielded several results with theoretical and methodological significance. First, we have replicated the
finding that incongruent behavior descriptions,
when relatively infrequent in a list of behavior
descriptions, are better recalled than congruent
behavior descriptions. Second, in the present
experiment this result has been obtained under
conditions where the list was not preceded by
an ensemble of congruent trait adjectives and
under conditions where the subjects did not
expect to have their memory tested. Recall
instructions were presented only after all lists
had been presented and without an earlier
warning instruction. Third, an examination
of the continuations generated by subjects at
the time lists were studied demonstrated that
attributional or causal reasoning was likelier
to occur for incongruent items than for congruent items within lists of behavior descriptions attributed to a single character. Fourth,
a correlation was found between the probability of explanation and probability of recall
measures. This correlation is consistent with
the hypothesis that causal attribution influences recall. However, the result is as yet only
correlational and does not strongly support an
argument for causal influence. Experiment 2
was designed to provide a stronger test of the
relationship between causal explanation and
recall.
Experiment 2
Method
Overview. Subjects, materials, and procedure were
similar to those employed in Experiment 1 with one major
alteration of the instructions to subjects. In Experiment
2 subjects were not allowed to extemporaneously generate
continuations for each behavior description. Rather, the
experimenter provided a written instruction preceding each
behavior description that indicated which type of continuation was to be generated by the subject. Thus, type of
continuation was manipulated by the experimenter and
became the focal independent variable in the experimental
design. An effect of continuation instruction on recall of
behavior descriptions would establish the causal priority
of attributional reasoning on memory.
Subjects. As in Experiment 1, 24 undergraduate university students served as subjects in the experiment and
were paid for their participation.
Design. Each subject studied, wrote continuation
phrases, and recalled 'sentences from six lists. Each list
contained nine behavior descriptions that were attributed
to a single hypothetical character, Six of the descriptions
within each list were consistent with one personality trait
adjective, and three descriptions were consistent with an
opposite-meaning trait adjective (incongruent items).
Within the set of six congruent descriptions in a list; two
items were preceded by an instruction code indicating that
the subject was to continue each of those items with an
explanation phrase, two were preceded by an instruction
code indicating that an elaboration continuation was required, and two were preceded by a code indicating that
a succession continuation was required. For the three incongruent descriptions, one was preceded by the explanation continuation code, one by the elaboration continuation code, and one by the succession continuation code.
Thus, for each list and for each item type (congruent or
incongruent) within the list explanation, elaboration, and
succession continuations were generated by subjects.
As in Experiment 1, one half of the lists presented to
a subject were associated with a congruent personality
trait that was evaluatively positive and the other half with
a trait that was evaluatively negative. Again, as in Experiment 1, 12 personality traits were used to construct the
51
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTION
lists and this set was divided into two six-trait replications.
Within each replication, counterbalancing plans ensured
that lists for each (congruent) trait occurred equally often
in each of the six presentation positions during an experimental session, that continuation instructions were
paired with specific behavior descriptions in a random
fashion, and that descriptions were randomly ordered
within a list attributed to a character in two different
random sequences across all subjects in the experimental
design. Thus, there were three between-subjects factors in
the experimental design: replication (two levels), continuation-instruction/behavior-description assignment (two
levels), and list order (nested within pairing, six levels).
The within-subject design included four factors: congruent
trait evaluation (good vs. bad), congruent trait (three levels;
dependent on replication), continuation instruction (explain, elaborate, or succeed), and item type (congruent
vs. incongruent).
Materials. The materials used in Experiment 2 were
identical to those used in Experiment 1. The sole change
was the use of nine-description lists only.
Procedure. There was only one change from the procedure used in Experiment 1. Subjects were instructed
that each behavior description phrase would be preceded
by a single capitalized word to indicate the type of continuation they were to produce for that phrase. Subjects
were given the following instructions:
The task you are to perform involves reading each
action description and writing a continuation for each
one. A continuation is a short phrase (written by you)
that provides a plausible extension of the original typed
description. In the experiment you will be asked to write
three types of continuations, "EXPLAIN," "SUCCEED,"
and "ELABORATE." The type of continuation which you
are to write for an item is indicated in capital letters
before the item. Try to use your imagination and write
a continuation that is satisfying to you for each item.
An "EXPLAIN" continuation is one which tells why
an action occurred; that is, it gives a reason for the
action. (Examples of each kind of continuation follow
these instructions.)
A "SUCCEED" continuation is one which describes
activity which might follow the behavior or occur after
it in time.
An "ELABORATE" continuation would give more details or further description of the behavior and its setting.
You should feel free to use varied and imaginative
continuations and should write continuations that make
sense to you for each item.
Other instructions for the continuation task were identical to those presented in Experiment 1, and the instructions for the recall task were identical as well.
Results
The dependent variable of interest in Experiment 2 is the probability of recall of items
presented under the various instruction sets.
These data are summarized in Figure 3. First,
there is a clear main effect of item type with
incongruent items (set size three out of nine)
.3D
,10
EXPLAIN
ELABORATE
SUCCEED
CONTINUATION INSTRUCTION
Figure 3. Recall memory task results from Experiment 2.
(Unfilled bars represent results for congruent items and
crosshatched bars represent results for incongruent items.)
recalled with a higher probability than congruent items, J^l, 20) = 10.21, p< .01, MSe =
.16 (16 of 24 subjects recalled a greater proportion of incongruent than congruent items).
There is also a main effect for the continuation
instruction variable, F(2,40) = 8.35, p < .001,
MSe = .23, with items continued by an explanation best remembered and items continued with an elaboration or succession phrase
less well remembered (15 of the 24 subjects
achieved their highest level of recall for items
that were continued with an explanation). Figure 3 shows an apparent interaction pattern
between the item type and continuation instruction factors such that there is almost no
difference in the-relative probability of recall
of a congruent or incongruent item under exr
planation continuation instructions but quite
a large difference between congruent and incongruent item recall under succession instructions. However, this interaction effect did
not reach conventional levels of statistical significance, F(2, 40) = 1.93, ns, MSe = .19.
Again, as in Experiment 1, no effect of evaluative valence (good or bad items) was found.
The simple hypothesis that continuation
52
REID HASTIE
type would have an effect on probability of
recall is clearly supported. Furthermore, the
prediction that a causal continuation would
provide for a more retrievable memory trace
than other types of continuation was also confirmed.
Experiment 3
A control experiment was conducted to determine whether or not the continuation task
required different amounts of time under the
different continuation instructions. The experiment was relevant to issues raised by a
concern that total time of stimulus exposure
(during the sentence continuation task) would
be correlated with the type of continuation
required and would serve as an explanatory
construct to account for subsequent performance on the recall test. We thought it was
important to explore the implications of the
simple total-time account for recall results before considering alternate accounts in terms
of type of processing.
We will not present a thorough outline of
the Method section for this experiment because
the results are straightforward and doubtless
quite general. Twelve undergraduate student
subjects were asked to perform the continuation task on six lists each containing 18 behavior descriptions. Each list contained a majority of 12 (congruent) items and 6 (incongruent) items. For each list subjects were asked
to explain, elaborate, and write temporal
successions for some of the descriptions. A
majority (12) of these continuation instructions were from one of the three types of continuation. This meant that for each subject
two of the lists included instructions to explain
12 of the items, elaborate 3 of the items, and
write temporal successions for 3 of the items.
Similarly, two of the lists included a majority
of the elaborate instructions, and two a majority of the succession instructions. For each
subject, total time to complete the list could
serve as a term in an algebraic equation, and
three equations could be set up—one for the
explain-, one for the elaborate-, and one for
the succession-majority condition. With three
equations and three unknowns (time taken to
perform the explanation, elaboration, and
succession continuations), it was possible to
solve for the unknowns yielding estimates of
the time to write one explanation, one elaboration, and one succession for each subject.
These estimates—time taken to complete
an explanation, an elaboration, or a succession
continuation—were entered as dependent
variables in an ANOVA. The mean estimates
were quite close to one another (23.9 s, 25.3
s, and 20.8 s, respectively), and the ANOVA did
not yield a significant effect of continuation
type, F(2, 33) = 1.72, ns, MSe = 36.76. Thus,
there is no empirical evidence that total time
to write the continuations was responsible for
differences in memorability of items subjected
to the three types of continuation.
General Discussion
The major contribution of the present research is to our understanding of the relationships between the occurrence of unexpected events, causal reasoning, and memory.
Previous research by the author and other psychologists (e.g., Hastie et al., 1980) introduced
and popularized the paradigm used in the
present experiments. In brief, the paradigm
involves setting subjects an impression formation or social judgment task, presenting information about a target character in the form
of trait attributions and sentences describing
the character's actions, and testing the subjects'
memory for information about the character.
One phenomenon obtained using this paradigm that has received considerable attention
in the social memory literature is the relatively
high recall of unexpected or incongruent behavior descriptions that can be observed under
some experimental conditions (e.g., Crocker
et al., 1983; Hamilton, Katz, & Leirer, 1980;
Hastie & Kumar, 1979; Hemsley & Marmurek, 1982;Srull, 1981; Wyer& Gordon, 1982).
The present empirical results make a significant contribution to our understanding of this
phenomenon by strongly implying that causal
reasoning, instigated by the occurrence of an
unexpected event, is one determinant of subsequent superior recall of that event.
The present results reinforce earlier conclusions that the occurrence of an unexpected
event elicits causal reasoning. There are certain
conditions in the present experimental paradigm that are probably necessary to produce
this result. First, subjects are reasoning about
social entities, and it is normal and perhaps
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTION
even adaptive to consider another person's
motives, intentions, or circumstances when
their actions surprise us. In contrast, we would
not expect subjects to react to the occurrence
of a surprising word presented in a list of other
common English words by reasoning about
the causal properties of that word. Second,
subjects were instructed to study the information presented about each hypothetical
character with the goal of integrating that information to form a sensible impression of
the target character. Two aspects of this instruction are probably important in producing
the incongruity-memory effect: (a) forming an
impression by integrating (not discounting) all
available information, and (b) making sense
out of information about an individual person
(rather than a group, or other less integral individual). Third, the pacing of the experimental continuation task was relatively leisurely, allowing subjects to optionally allocate
their attention to various aspects of the stimulus materials or to alternative strategic subtasks. Fourth, the nature of the incongruity,
defined with reference to the relationships between behaviors and personality traits, was
dramatic and obvious. The incongruent items
were always in a minority in the full lists of
descriptions attributed to a character and they
were inconsistent with the majority items and
the personality traits on both evaluative and
descriptive grounds. Pretests of experimental
materials and tasks in our own laboratory and
communications with other colleagues suggest
that all of these conditions taken jointly may
be necessary to produce the moderately high
rates of causal reasoning observed in our experiments.
Our failure to observe differential rates of
causal reasoning for evaluatively good versus
bad behavior descriptions suggests that one
type of unexpectedness, violations of the norm
that socially undesirable acts occur with relatively low frequencies in everyday life, does
not instigate causal reasoning. Some researchers (Kanouse & Hanson, 1972) have speculated
that socially undesirable acts that are relatively
infrequent are more informative and have relatively large impacts on social judgments. If
informativeness is taken in an information
theory sense, it should be related to how surprising or unexpected an act is. However, no
relationship was obtained between how sur-
53
prising a socially desirable or undesirable act
is and the occurrence of causal reasoning. The
fact that exactly half of the presented behavior
descriptions were socially undesirable, an unnaturally high proportion, may limit the generality of this conclusion.
In defense of the generality of the present
results to naturally occurring situations in
which a person reviews his or her memories
of casual acquaintances, we would cite the variety of conditions under which similar results
have been obtained. The basic memory result—high probability of recall of a small set
of impression-incongruent events—has been
obtained (a) in dozens of experiments using
various list lengths and impression types, (b)
for trait and behavior descriptions, (c) when
presented in auditory, visual, or film modes,
and (d) when acquired under incidental or intentional learning conditions (e.g., Hastie,
1980; Hastie & Kumar, 1979; Srull, 1981).
Current research in our laboratory using staged
interactions between true subjects and the experimenter's confederates has also obtained
similar results. At present we do not have evidence for the instigation of causal reasoning
outside of the present research and the results
cited in the introduction to the present article.
Nonetheless, these results have been obtained
in a wide variety of social judgment tasks.
Taken together, all of these findings provide a
strong prima facie case for the generality of
the present conclusions to at least some analogous natural social-acquaintance situations.
The notion that unexpected events elicit
causal reasoning appears to be conceptually
the most basic of the conditions that have been
hypothesized to instigate causal reasoning, in
the sense that other specific conditions (with
the possible exception of outcome dependence)
may be seen as subordinate to the unexpectedness condition. Furthermore, empirical research has provided the most direct and substantial evidence for the role of the unexpectedness condition in instigating causal
reasoning. Some philosophical analyses of the
perception of causation (e.g., Hart & Honore,
1959; Mackie, 1974) have also emphasized the
significance of unexpectedness or deviation
from a normal course of events as a condition
for causal reasoning and for the identification
of causes. One speculation, consistent with
these philosophical analyses, is that causal rea-
54
REID HASTIE
soning is elicited by changes in the state of
the world, particularly when these changes are
unexpected. Thus, perhaps it is more reasonable to talk of to-be-explained deviations or
changes in conditions rather than to-be-explained events. The implication is that when
a social perceiver attempts to explain a state
of affairs, both the current state and its conceivable alternatives taken together define the
to-be-explained effect. Furthermore, expectations about other normal states of the world
will determine which factors are selected as
causal or explanatory events. As the philosophers have put it, "the cause . . . is a difference in the normal course which accounts
for the difference in the outcome" (Hart &
Honore, 1959, p. 27), or "both cause and effect
are seen as differences within a field" (Mackie,
1974, p. 35).
The second major contribution of the present research is to characterize the role of causal
reasoning in social memory tasks. The results
are consistent with the outline of an information processing model introduced by Hastie
and Kumar (1979; see also Hastie, 1980) and
extended by Srull (1981). In summary, that
theoretical analysis included the following
postulates:
1. During the acquisition stage of a memory
task (corresponding to the stage of the experiment during which subjects generated continuations for behavior-description sentences
in the present experiments), prepositional
representations of behaviors attributed to each
hypothetical character are formed in memory.
2. If the subject is attempting to form an
impression of the hypothetical character to
whom the behavior descriptions are attributed,
behaviors that are unexpected or incongruent
with reference to this impression will receive
special attention. This attention may take the
form of special processing, for example, attempts to explain why the surprising or unexpected act was performed or simply additional processing. The product of the extra
processing or special processing is an increased
number of associative, links between the incongruent behavior and other behaviors attributed to that character.
3. During the retention interval, following
the acquisition task, forgetting occurs as associative links between propositions and within
propositions are lost at the same rate for in-
congruent acts and for other acts attributed
to the character.
4. During the retrieval stage, corresponding
to the point in the present experiments at
which the subject is instructed to attempt to
recall as much information as possible about
each character, a search process occurs in
which the subject examines information in
memory by tracing down pathways in the network of associations linking information. The
probability of retrieving a particular behavior
description is directly related to the number
of associative paths that link that behavior to
other information about the character. Ineongruent events, by virtue of their longer or
deeper processing, will be linked to other information about a character stored in memory.
Thus, they will be likelier to be recalled than
behaviors that were not incongruent at the
time of study.
Other cognitive psychologists have hypothesized that unexpected or atypical events will
be processed differently than unsurprising
events and that memory for the unexpected
will be superior to memory for the mundane.
Graesser and Nakamura (1982) have suggested
that atypical events will be linked to relevant
knowledge structures such as scripts (Abelson,
1981) by distinctive associative links called
tags. Tagged events will be especially well remembered and discriminated from similar but
nonoccurring atypical items on recall and recognition tests. Schank (1982) has stated similar
hypotheses about memory processes and
structures. He argued that learning that occurs
after expectations are disconfirmed, "failuredriven memory," is the most important memory process in everyday life. The present experiments were not designed to discriminate
between models that hypothesize distinctive
tags and models that hypothesize elaboration
of associative links to explain the relative high
recall of incongruent behaviors. Both types of
accounts are plausible for the present results.
The results of the present experiments support predictions that incongruent events will
be likelier to receive special processing during
acquisition in the form of causal attribution
and that these events will be better recalled
than events that are not incongruent.
The results of the third control experiment
reported in the present article imply that the
increased memory for an event that is asso-
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTION
elated with causally explaining why the event
occurred does not require more processing
time than other types of memory encoding or
elaboration processes. Our speculation is that
causal reasoning leads to the creation of many
links between items in memory but without
requiring extra processing time for this elaboration to occur. Bradshaw and Anderson
(1982) apply a similar interpretation to the
effects of causal reasoning on memory trace
structure.
Final conclusions concerning causal reasoning and person memory can be summarized succinctly. When unexpected behaviors
are attributed to a person, the perceiver is relatively likely to engage in causal reasoning to
understand why these behaviors occurred. One
product of this causal reasoning is a more
elaborate memory representation for the unexpected information and more links between
the memory trace for that event and other
traces in memory, leading to relatively high
levels of recall for information about unexpected events.
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