Doing things efficiently: Testing an account of why simple explanations are satisfying

IF 3 2区 心理学 Q1 PSYCHOLOGY
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

People often find simple explanations more satisfying than complex ones. Across seven preregistered experiments, we provide evidence that this simplicity preference is not specific to explanations and may instead arises from a broader tendency to prefer completing goals in efficient ways. In each experiment, participants (total N=2820) learned of simple and complex methods for producing an outcome, and judged which was more appealing—either as an explanation why the outcome happened, or as a process for producing it. Participants showed similar preferences across judgments. They preferred simple methods as explanations and processes in tasks with no statistical information about the reliability or pervasiveness of causal elements. But when this statistical information was provided, preferences for simple causes often diminished and reversed in both kinds of judgments. Together, these findings suggest that people may assess explanations much in the same ways they assess methods for completing goals, and that both kinds of judgments depend on the same cognitive mechanisms.
高效做事:测试简单解释令人满意的原因。
人们通常认为简单的解释比复杂的解释更令人满意。通过七项预先登记的实验,我们提供的证据表明,这种简单性偏好并不是解释所特有的,相反,它可能源于一种更广泛的倾向,即人们更倾向于以高效的方式完成目标。在每个实验中,参与者(总人数=2820)都了解了产生一个结果的简单方法和复杂方法,并判断哪种方法更有吸引力--无论是作为解释结果发生的原因,还是作为产生结果的过程。在不同的判断中,参与者表现出相似的偏好。在没有关于因果要素的可靠性或普遍性的统计信息的任务中,他们更喜欢简单的方法作为解释和过程。但当提供了这种统计信息时,在两种判断中,对简单原因的偏好往往会减弱或逆转。这些发现共同表明,人们评估解释的方式可能与评估完成目标的方法的方式大致相同,而且这两种判断都依赖于相同的认知机制。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Psychology 医学-心理学
CiteScore
5.40
自引率
3.80%
发文量
29
审稿时长
50 days
期刊介绍: Cognitive Psychology is concerned with advances in the study of attention, memory, language processing, perception, problem solving, and thinking. Cognitive Psychology specializes in extensive articles that have a major impact on cognitive theory and provide new theoretical advances. Research Areas include: • Artificial intelligence • Developmental psychology • Linguistics • Neurophysiology • Social psychology.
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