Causal Attribution and Perceived Realism of Stories

Just as people generate causal explanations for social events around them, story readers usually generate inferences about causality of events when reading a story. The attribution literature suggests that, when judging events that happen to others, people spontaneously generate dispositional explanations for negative events and situational explanations for positive events and the reverse when judging events that happen to themselves. Three experiments examined how these spontaneously generated inferences of causality interacted with causal explanations provided by the text of a story to influence perceived realism. The results indicate that the relationship between spontaneously generated causal attributions and information supplied by the story had little influence on realism judgments about story characters or about other people. When evaluating the story scenario for the self, however, results of all three experiments show that people find information consistent with their own spontaneous attributions more realistic. The results contribute to our understanding of the psychological processes that may drive realism evaluations of stories and possible contrasting mechanisms between attributions in story worlds and the social world.