ABSTRACT
How people explain events is a standard topic in social psychology. It goes under the name “attribution theory,” referring to how people make attributions of causation. Such theorizing in social psychology has grown up as an independent body of propositions, rather unconnected with other ideas in cognitive social psychology. From our point of view, this is unfortunate. As outlined in our introductory chapter, we emphasize flexibility of function in the application of knowledge structures. It seems cognitively inefficient (and implausible) that there should be specialized structures and processes solely for the purpose of explaining events. Rather, “explanation” may be more profitably conceived as a special case of the general process of understanding. The same knowledge structures used in understanding ought to be implicated in explanation.
