The influence of an inherence heuristic on scientific explanation

[摘要] Although scientific reasoning is usually deliberate, it may also be influenced by the intuitive processes involved in everyday reasoning. Here, I investigated whether explanatory heuristic processes biased towards inherence (that is, the tendency to oversample easily-accessible inherent facts; Cimpian & Salomon, 2014) influence scientific explanation. Across seven studies, children and adults (N = 1,455) explained outcomes of unfamiliar experiments in physics, biology, and chemistry predominantly in terms of inherent features. These inherence-biased explanations exhibited multiple signatures of heuristic reasoning (e.g., they decreased with age and time spent deliberating). Strikingly, I also found traces of this bias toward inherence in initial explanations of phenomena from the history of science (e.g., phlogiston explains combustion); these historical explanations were obtained via a survey of historians of science and were coded by hypothesis-blind researchers. These findings suggest that scientific explanation may be influenced by the same inherence heuristic that biases everyday explanation.

[效力级别] Psychology

[关键词] Explanation;Psychology;Reasoning;Heuristics