Physicists Love What Works, Right?

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In our lab cases, we want to know what the ground truth is, right? So we set things up so that we have some basis for saying what's most likely or what's not. But in most real-world cases, we don't have the ability to cleanly say when people are getting things right and when they're getting things wrong. And so what we could be seeing in the lab is the overgeneralization of a strategy that actually maybe does make a lot of sense in a lot of real- world cases.

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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