{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/98226"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/98226","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"The influence of an inherence heuristic on scientific explanation","abstract":"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.","abstract_html":"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.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Horne, Zachary S"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":"Psychology","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Cimpian, Andrei","Hummel, John","Pomerantz, Eva","Brewer, William","Hyde, Daniel","Livengood, Jonathan"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2017,"date_issued":"2017-09-29T16:39:05Z","date_published":"2017-09-29T16:39:05Z","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:35Z","subjects":["Explanation","Psychology","Reasoning","Heuristics"],"languages":["en"],"rights":["Copyright 2017 Zachary Horne"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/2142/98226","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Cimpian, Andrei","Hummel, John","Pomerantz, Eva","Brewer, William","Hyde, Daniel","Livengood, Jonathan"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Horne, Zachary S"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2017-09-29T16:39:05Z","2019-09-30T09:15:14Z","2017-06-07","2017-08"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Psychology"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Dissertation"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Ph.D."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Explanation","Psychology","Reasoning","Heuristics"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2017 Zachary Horne"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/2142/98226"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["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.","Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2019-08-01","The student, Zachary Horne, accepted the attached license on 2017-06-06 at 18:01.","The student, Zachary Horne, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2017-06-06 at 18:11.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2017-06-07 at 16:19.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #11197 on 2017-09-29 at 11:13:27","Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-29T16:39:05Z (GMT). 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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.","Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2019-08-01","The student, Zachary Horne, accepted the attached license on 2017-06-06 at 18:01.","The student, Zachary Horne, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2017-06-06 at 18:11.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2017-06-07 at 16:19.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #11197 on 2017-09-29 at 11:13:27","Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-29T16:39:05Z (GMT). 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