INVOKING NATURALISTIC AND RELIGIOUS ATTRIBUTIONS - A CASE OF APPLYINGTHE AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC - THE REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC

This experiment examined the cognitive strategies people use when choo sing among naturalistic, religious, and supernaturalistic-nonreligious explanations for behavioral events. A total of 102 college students r esponded to a series of 16 vignettes, after each of wh ich they provid ed an attributional analysis by rating each item in a menu of possible explanations. The events depicted in the vignettes varied in their sa lient features, for example, the protagonist exercised a high or low d egree of control over the event and its outcome, the outcome was posit ive or negative. The results suggested that people rely on the represe ntativeness heuristic more than the availability heuristic when perfor ming attributional analysis: they favor attributions whose salient fea tures match the salient features of the events-to-be explained rather than attributions that are most quickly retrieved. Moreover people mak e quicker attributional decisions when the salient features of the eve nts-to-be-explained are clearly representative or clearly unrepresenta tive of the salient features of their attributions, and make slower de cisions when the representativeness of the event is unclear. The prese nt experiment also adds to the accumulating evidence that many people do make religious and other supernaturalistic attributions, albeit les s frequently than they make naturalistic attributions. Finally, the re sults suggest that religious or other supernaturalistic explanations a re usually invoked in conjunction with rather than as alternatives to naturalistic explanations.