Invoking Naturalistic and Religious Attributions: A Case of Applying the Availability Heuristic? The Representativeness Heuristic?

This experiment examined the cognitive strategies people use when choosing among naturalistic, religious, and supernaturalistic-nonreligious explanations for behavioral events. A total of 102 college students responded to a series of 16 vignettes, after each of which they provided an attributional analysis by rating each item in a menu of possible explanations. The events depicted in the vignettes varied in their salient features, for example, the protagonist exercised a high or low degree of control over the event and its outcome, the outcome was positive or negative. The results suggested that people rely on the representativeness heuristic more than the availability heuristic when performing attributional analysis: they favor attributions whose salient features match the salient features of the events-to-be explained rather than attributions that are most quickly retrieved. Moreover people make quicker attributional decisions when the salient features of the events-to-be-explained are clearly representative or clearly unrepresentative of the salient features of their attributions, and make slower decisions when the representativeness of the event is unclear. The present experiment also adds to the accumulating evidence that many people do make religious and other supernaturalistic attributions, albeit less frequently than they make naturalistic attributions. Finally, the results suggest that religious or other supernaturalistic explanations are usually invoked in conjunction with rather than as alternatives to naturalistic explanations.