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Socially shared representations of history have been important in creating, maintaining and changing a people's identity. Their management and negotiation are central to interethnic and international relations. We present a narrative framework to represent how collectively significant events become (selectively) incorporated in social representations that enable positioning of ethnic, national and supranational identities. This perspective creates diachronic (temporal) links between the functional (e.g. realistic conflict theory), social identity, and cognitive perspectives on intergroup relations. The charters embedded in these representations condition nations with similar interests to adopt different political stances in dealing with current events, and can influence the perceived stability and legitimacy of social orders. They are also instrumental in determining social identity strategies for reacting to negative social comparisons, and can influence the relationships between national and ethnic identities.

Causal explanation takes place in and takes the form of conversation. Explanations are selected by questions and are thus governed by general rules of discourse. A conversational model of causal explanation is introduced that explicates social aspects of the explanation process by postulating that good explanations must be relevant to the focus of a why question, as well as being true. The notion of explanatory relevance enables an integration of the major models of the attribution process by showing that they use the same counterfactual logic but address different causal questions. The conversational perspective suggests a reinterpretation of many attributional biases, and also highlights the role of interpersonal goals in generating implicit questions, which in turn constrain explanations. Finally, the relevance of the conversational perspective for research on causal networks, the social context of explanation, and intrapsychic explanation is noted.Causal explanation is first and foremost a form of social interaction. One speaks of giving causal explanations, but not attributions, perceptions, comprehensions, categorizations, or memories. The verb to explain is a three-place predicate: Someone explains something to someone. Causal explanation takes the form of conversation and is thus subject to the rules of conversation.Causal explanation is therefore different from causal attribution, which does not involve an interpersonal exchange. In its wider sense, attribution describes a process whereby one ascribes some phenomenon to its origin. Thus, one attributes effects to causes, actions to intentions, and sayings to their authors. This sense of attribution is close to that which Heider (1958) had in mind when writing of how the sensation of light reflecting ofFa surface may be attributed to its distal source, the sun, or how an exam performance may be attributed to its source in a student's ability, effort, or luck. Thus, attributing something to someone is not the same as explaining something to that person.The difference between this sense of attribution and conversational explanation is nicely drawn out by the experience of U.S. Senator Joseph Biden. During his campaign for the 1988 Democratic Party nomination for president, Biden gave an impassioned campaign speech about social inequality that faithThis research was conducted while I was supported by the Cognitive Science committee of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Portions of this article were read at the "Beyond Assertion" conference, Cleves, West Germany, September 3-5, 1987, and at the meeting of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, Madison, Wisconsin, October 20-22, 1988.I would like to thank Ulf Bockenholt; Eirian Davies; Miles Hewstone; Robin Hogarth; Douglas Medin; Ben Slugoski; Richard Smith; the action editor, Nancy Cantor; and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article and Curt Haugeveldt and Alan Strathman for help in preparation of the figures.Correspondence concerning this article...

We measure the degree of overconfidence in judgement (in the form of miscalibration, "i.e." the tendency to overestimate the precision of one's information) and self-monitoring (a form of attentiveness to social cues) of 245 participants and also observe their behaviour in an experimental financial market under asymmetric information. Miscalibrated traders, underestimating the conditional uncertainty about the asset value, are expected to be especially vulnerable to the winner's curse. High self-monitors are expected to behave strategically and achieve superior results. Our empirical results show that miscalibration reduces and self-monitoring enhances trading performance. The effect of the psychological variables is strong for men but non-existent for women. Copyright The Review of Economic Studies Limited, 2005.

Social rules governing communication require the listener to go beyond the information given in a message, contrary to the assumption that rational people should operate only on the information explicitly given in judgment tasks. An attributional model of conversational inference is presented that shows how hearers' message interpretations are guided by their perceptions of the speaker. The model is then applied to the analysis of experiments on reasoning processes in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and decision research. It is shown that the model can predict how experimental manipulations of relevant source and message attributes affect respondents' judgments. Failure to recognize the role of conversational assumptions in governing inference processes can lead rational responses to be misclassined as errors and their source misattributed to cognitive shortcomings in the decision maker. Q. How is your family? A. Fairly well, thank you.

Social representations of world history were assessed using the open-ended questions, “What are the most important events in world history?” and “Who are the most influential persons in world history in the last 1,000 years?”Data from six Asian and six Western samples showed cross-cultural consensus. Historical representations were (a) focused on the recent past, (b) centered around politics and war, and (c) dominated by the events of the World Wars and (d) the individual Hitler, who was universally perceived as negative. (e) Representations were more Eurocentric than ethnocentric.(f) The importance of economics and science was underrepresented.(g) Most cultures nominated people (more than events) idiosyncratic to their own culture. These data reflect power relations in the world and provide resources and constraints for the conduct of international relations. The degree of cross-cultural consensus suggests that hybridity across Eastern and Western cultures in the representation of knowledge may be underestimated.

Previous research has demonstrated substantial effects of context on the numerical interpretation of verbal probability statements and has attributed these effects to the perceived base-rate probability of the predicted events. These context effects are shown to be attributable to the perceived severity of the predicted event as well as to the perceived base rate. Furthermore, there is evidence for strong context effects that are not explained by either of these 2 variables. The implications of these results for the use of verbal probability statements in the communication of probability information are discussed.

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