Alignable and nonalignable differences in causal explanations

Prior research indicates that people may base their causal explanations on distinctive features between an event and a contrasting background instance in which the event did not occur. Research on similarity judgments suggests that there are two types of distinctive features: alignable differences, which are corresponding characteristics of a pair, and nonalignable differences, which are characteristics of one item for which there are no corresponding characteristics in the other. In three experiments, the hypothesis that people's evaluations of causal explanations vary as a function of feature alignment was examined. The results suggest that people will rate explanations differently on the basis of alignable or nonalignable differences, depending on the type of the event, and that alignability depends on the relational structure among the features of the event.