Those who ignore the past are doomed to be heartless: Lay historicist theory is associated with humane responses to the struggles and transgressions of others.

When one learns that current struggles or transgressions of an individual or group are rooted in an unfortunate history, one experiences compassion and reduced blame. Prior research has demonstrated this by having participants receive (or not) a concrete historicist narrative regarding the particular individual or group under consideration. Here, we take a different approach. We explore the possibility that everyday people show meaningful variation in a broad lay theory that we call lay historicism. Lay historicists believe that-as a general fact-people's psychological characteristics and life outcomes are powerfully molded by their life histories. We present eight studies linking lay historicism to broad tendencies toward compassion and non-blaming. Collectively, Studies 1-5 suggest that lay historicism affects compassion and blame, respectively, via distinct mechanisms: (1) Lay historicism is associated with compassion because it creates a sense that-as a general fact-past suffering lies behind present difficulties, and (2) lay historicism is associated with blame mitigation because historicists reject the idea that-as a general fact-people freely and autonomously create their moral character. Thus, lay historicism increases compassion and decreases blame via distinct mechanisms. The remaining studies diversify our evidence base. Study 6 examines criminal justice philosophies rather than broad moral traits (as in the earlier studies) and shows that lay historicism is associated with preference for humane criminal justice philosophies. Study 7 moves from abstract beliefs to concrete situations and shows that lay historicism predicts reduced blaming of an irresponsible peer who is encountered face-to-face. One additional study-in our Supplemental Materials-shows that lay historicism predicts lower levels of blaming on implicit measures, although only among those who also reject lay controllability theories. Overall, these studies provide consistent support for the possibility that lay historicism is broadly associated with humane responding to the struggles and transgressions of others.

The Social Explanatory Styles Questionnaire: assessing moderators of basic social-cognitive phenomena including spontaneous trait inference, the fundamental attribution error, and moral blame.

Why is he poor? Why is she failing academically? Why is he so generous? Why is she so conscientious? Answers to such everyday questions--social explanations--have powerful effects on relationships at the interpersonal and societal levels. How do people select an explanation in particular cases? We suggest that, often, explanations are selected based on the individual's pre-existing general theories of social causality. More specifically, we suggest that over time individuals develop general beliefs regarding the causes of social events. We refer to these beliefs as social explanatory styles. Our goal in the present article is to offer and validate a measure of individual differences in social explanatory styles. Accordingly, we offer the Social Explanatory Styles Questionnaire (SESQ), which measures three independent dimensions of social explanatory style: Dispositionism, historicism, and controllability. Studies 1-3 examine basic psychometric properties of the SESQ and provide positive evidence regarding internal consistency, factor structure, and both convergent and divergent validity. Studies 4-6 examine predictive validity for each subscale: Does each explanatory dimension moderate an important phenomenon of social cognition? Results suggest that they do. In Study 4, we show that SESQ dispositionism moderates the tendency to make spontaneous trait inferences. In Study 5, we show that SESQ historicism moderates the tendency to commit the Fundamental Attribution Error. Finally, in Study 6 we show that SESQ controllability predicts polarization of moral blame judgments: Heightened blaming toward controllable stigmas (assimilation), and attenuated blaming toward uncontrollable stigmas (contrast). Decades of research suggest that explanatory style regarding the self is a powerful predictor of self-functioning. We think it is likely that social explanatory styles--perhaps comprising interactive combinations of the basic dimensions tapped by the SESQ--will be similarly potent predictors of social functioning. We hope the SESQ will be a useful tool for exploring that possibility.

More than a lack of control: external explanations can evoke compassion for outgroups by increasing perceptions of suffering (independent of perceived control).

People's explanations for social events powerfully affect their socioemotional responses. We examine why explanations affect emotions, with a specific focus on how external explanations for negative aspects of an outgroup can create compassion for the outgroup. The dominant model of these processes suggests that external explanations can reduce perceived control and that compassion is evoked when negative aspects of an outgroup are perceived as beyond their control. We agree that perceived control is important, but we propose a model in which explanations also affect perceived suffering of an outgroup, and that perceived suffering is an additional mechanism connecting external explanations to compassion. Studies are presented that support our integrative dual-mediation model and that pinpoint factors-depth of cognitive processing, expansive sense of identity-that modulate the extent to which the external explanation/perceived suffering mechanism evokes compassion.

Ingroup identity moderates the impact of social explanations on intergroup attitudes: external explanations are not inherently prosocial.

Social explanations-causal frameworks used to understand group status and action-shape intergroup attitudes and emotions. Yet, different theoretical perspectives offer divergent predictions regarding associations between external explanations-which construe group actions or outcomes as being caused by forces outside of the group-and consequent attitudes toward outgroups. Specifically, whereas the authors' social explanations framework suggests that external explanations regarding a low-status group will foster prosocial responses, other perspectives suggest that external explanations will foster defensive responses. Four studies using both implicit and explicit measures suggest that predictions from the social explanations framework capture the psychology of dominant group members weakly identified with the dominant ingroup, whereas predictions of defensiveness characterize the psychology of high-identifiers. A major implication is that social explanations do not have fixed meanings and that external explanations-despite being typically seen as prosocial-do not necessarily elicit positive responses to outgroups.