Why People Choose Simpler Explanations More Often Than They Should

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There is some evidence that people seem to be more sensitive to the evidence than they ought to compared to Bayesian inference. In my own lab, one of the things that we have looked at as I mentioned is simplicity. We define simpler explanations as those that involve fewer causes that are themselves. So for example, if you have two symptoms that you can explain by appeal to one disease or by appeal to two diseases that each just cause one symptom, you find that people prefer the single disease explanation more often than they should.

There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know the reason why. There are obvious philosophy questions here: What is an explanation? Do explanations bottom out, or go forever? But there are also psychology questions: What precisely is it that we seek when we demand an explanation? What makes us satisfied with one? Tania Lombrozo is a psychologist who is also conversant with the philosophical side of things. She offers some pretty convincing explanations for why we value explanation so highly.

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Tania Lombrozo received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of psychology at Princeton. Among her awards are the Gittier Award from the American Psychological Foundation, an Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

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