Explanations, attributions and the social context of unexpected behaviour
Mansur Lalljee, Margaret C Watson, Peter Anthony White · European Journal of Social Psychology · 1982
Abstract The study investigated the effect of the expectancies a perceiver holds about the occurrence of a particular behaviour and his or her familiarity with the situation in which the behaviour occurs, for the way in which an event is explained. Subjects were presented with brief descriptions of hypothetical events which varied in terms of the familiarity of the situation. Dependent variables included ratings of causality to personal and situational causes as well as open‐ended explanations which were content analysed to distinguish between four different types of person and four different types of situation elements. The results showed that explanations for unexpected behaviour are more complex than for expected behaviour; that if the situation is familiar to the subject, unexpected behaviour is explained by introducing more person elements while if it is unfamiliar, unexpected behaviour is explained by introducing more situation elements; and that the distribution of different types of person and situation elements is affected by familiarity and expectancy.