ABSTRACT
Despite the recent proliferation of work on excuses and justifications, or more generally accounts, within the field of communication (see reviews in Cody & McLaughlin, 1990a, 1990b), such work has seemed to have little impact on social psychologists interested in ordinary explanation, with only a few notable exceptions (see for example Weiner, Amirkhan, Folkes, & Vereth, 1987; Weiner, Figueroa-Muñoz, & Kakihara, 1991), and at the same time communication researchers do not seem to have evidenced any interest in how causal reasoning and event comprehension might shape communicated explanations. The project reported here was designed in part to marry the insight gained from two largely independent research traditions, with the goal of furthering our understanding of the mutual interdependence of event comprehension and context.
