The influence of an inherence heuristic on scientific explanation

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2017

Author dc:creator

• Horne, Zachary S

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cimpian, Andrei
• Hummel, John
• Pomerantz, Eva
• Brewer, William
• Hyde, Daniel
• Livengood, Jonathan

• Explanation
• Psychology
• Reasoning
• Heuristics

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2017 Zachary Horne

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/98226

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/98226