@article{c8b67d5056f744fa8114827a3ffdab9a,
title = "Evaluating everyday explanations",
abstract = "People frequently rely on explanations provided by others to understand complex phenomena. A fair amount of attention has been devoted to the study of scientific explanation, and less on understanding how people evaluate naturalistic, everyday explanations. Using a corpus of diverse explanations from Reddit{\textquoteright}s “Explain Like I{\textquoteright}m Five” and other online sources, we assessed how well a variety of explanatory criteria predict judgments of explanation quality. We find that while some criteria previously identified as explanatory virtues do predict explanation quality in naturalistic settings, other criteria, such as simplicity, do not. Notably, we find that people have a preference for complex explanations that invoke more causal mechanisms to explain an effect. We propose that this preference for complexity is driven by a desire to identify enough causes to make the effect seem inevitable.",
keywords = "Causal reasoning, Explanation, Knowledge",
author = "Zemla, {Jeffrey C.} and Steven Sloman and Christos Bechlivanidis and Lagnado, {David A.}",
note = "Funding Information: Acknowledgments This project/publication was made possible through the support of a grant from The Varieties of Understanding Project at Fordham University and The John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Varieties of Understanding Project, Fordham University, or The John Templeton Foundation. The authors would like to thank Kethural Manokaran and Kenneth Peluso for their excellent research assistance, Uriel Cohen Priva for linguistic analysis suggestions, and members of the Sloman-Austerweil laboratory for helpful discussions. In addition, we thank Tania Lombrozo and Sunny Khemlani for their feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Funding Information: This project/publication was made possible through the support of a grant from The Varieties of Understanding Project at Fordham University and The John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Varieties of Understanding Project, Fordham University, or The John Templeton Foundation. The authors would like to thank Kethural Manokaran and Kenneth Peluso for their excellent research assistance, Uriel Cohen Priva for linguistic analysis suggestions, and members of the Sloman-Austerweil laboratory for helpful discussions. In addition, we thank Tania Lombrozo and Sunny Khemlani for their feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017, Psychonomic Society, Inc.",
year = "2017",
month = oct,
day = "1",
doi = "10.3758/s13423-017-1258-z",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "24",
pages = "1488--1500",
journal = "Psychonomic Bulletin and Review",
issn = "1069-9384",
publisher = "Springer New York",
number = "5",
}