Cognitive processing of causal explanations: a sociocognitive perspective

✍ Scribed by Ahmed Channouf; Jacques Py; Alain Somat

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 159 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0046-2772
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0992(199908/09)29:5/6<673::aid-ejsp956>3.0.co;2-p

✦ Synopsis

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 speci®cally, 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 pretrained 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.