ABSTRACT
We know that an explanation which is preferred by the observer of an event is not necessarily preferred by the actor (Storms, 1973; Jones and Nisbett, 1972; Ross, 1977; Goldberg, 1978). We also know that an explanation which seems probable from the point of view of a lower-grade employee is not necessarily probable from a manager’s point of view (Beauvois and Le Poultier, 1986; Beauvois, 1994; Dubois, 1994; Pansu, 1997), or that an explanation which is true for a lay person is not necessarily true for a scientist (Kelley, 1972). It appears therefore that the truth value of a causal statement varies with the person who produces or receives it. Yet the explanations concerned are never considered strange; they always seem more or less utterable in the situation in which they are uttered. The literature in social psychology offers a criterion with which to judge this utterability. It is the criterion which Beauvois and Ghiglione (1981a) called plausibility. We shall see in what follows that plausibility is indeed a pertinent criterion for judging the sociolinguistic quality of an explanatory statement. But we shall also see that this criterion does not always prove pertinent for discerning the cognitive processes at work in the decoding of causal statements by potential receivers. In particular, plausibility does not allow us to fully understand why certain explanations are more rapidly processed than others. To account for this, we must turn to criteria other than the truth value or plausibility. We shall see that the most pertinent dimension seems to be social acceptability, examined here in terms of normativity, that is, in terms of the internal character of explanations. This dimension enables us to understand why internal explanations can be processed more rapidly than external explanations.
