Cognitive processing of causal explanations: a sociocognitive perspective

This article is aimed at providing further supporting evidence for the assu mption that the cognitive processing of certain kinds of information is soc ially driven, even at very low levels of processing. More specifically, we hypothesize that knowledge associated with a social norm like the norm of i nternality (Jellison & Green, 1981, Beauvois & Dubois, 1988) may be more ac cessible 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 allows us to show that 10- and 1 1-year-old children (age at which the norm of internality is being acquired ) in an analogous situations 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 train ing adults in this way did not change the conclusions drawn irt Experiment I. The results as a whole are discussed in ter ms of the potential storage in semantic memory of the social value associated with normative explanatio n. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.