The Social Value of Causal Explanations: Norm of Internality or Conformity to our Causal Assumptions?
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According to the hypothesis of a norm of internality, internal causal explanations are more valued socially than the external ones, irrespective of event social desirability (Beauvois & Dubois, 1988; Dubois 2009). Most of the investigations that validated it have used generic events (e.g. Jack took a promotion), i. e. descriptions without information enabling an internal attribution rather than external one. According to Kelley (1972), in the absence of attributional information about an event, people explain it by applying a causal schema connecting the event to preconceived causes (e.g. Jack worked well). If for certain events the more schematic causes are internal, for others they are external. Our alternative to the norm of internality hypothesis argues that for generic desirable or undesirable events, the more a cause in an explanation is schematic of the event, the more it is socially valued. An experiment has shown, as expected, that to be well valued, it is better to choose schematic causal explanations of events in a questionnaire rather than the internal explanations.
Réseaux sociaux