Inside Ockham's razor: A mechanism driving preferences for simpler explanations.

People often prefer simpler explanations, defined as those that posit the presence of fewer causes (e.g., positing the presence of a single cause, Cause A, rather than two causes, Causes B and C, to explain observed effects). Here, we test one hypothesis about the mechanisms underlying this preference: that people tend to reason as if they are using "agnostic" explanations, which remain neutral about the presence/absence of additional causes (e.g., comparing "A" vs. "B and C," while remaining neutral about the status of B and C when considering "A," or of A when considering "B and C"), even in cases where "atheist" explanations, which specify the absence of additional causes (e.g., "A and not B or C" vs. "B and C and not A"), are more appropriate. Three studies with US-based samples (total N = 982) tested this idea by using scenarios for which agnostic and atheist strategies produce diverging simplicity/complexity preferences, and asking participants to compare explanations provided in atheist form. Results suggest that people tend to ignore absent causes, thus overgeneralizing agnostic strategies, which can produce preferences for simpler explanations even when the complex explanation is objectively more probable. However, these unwarranted preferences were reduced by manipulations that encouraged participants to consider absent causes: making absences necessary to produce the effects (Study 2), or describing absences as causes that produce alternative effects (Study 3). These results shed light on the mechanisms driving preferences for simpler explanations, and on when these mechanisms are likely to lead people astray.

Origins of emotional consciousness.

While the field of emotions research has benefited from new developments in neuroscience, many theoretical questions remain unsolved. We propose that integrating our iterative reprocessing (IR) framework with the passive frame theory (PFT) may help unify competing theoretical perspectives of emotion. Specifically, we propose that PFT and the IR framework offer a point of origin for emotional experience.

Simplicity as a Cue to Probability: Multiple Roles for Simplicity in Evaluating Explanations.

People often face the challenge of evaluating competing explanations. One approach is to assess the explanations' relative probabilities-for example, applying Bayesian inference to compute their posterior probabilities. Another approach is to consider an explanation's qualities or "virtues," such as its relative simplicity (i.e., the number of unexplained causes it invokes). The current work investigates how these two approaches are related. Study 1 found that simplicity is used to infer the inputs to Bayesian inference (explanations' priors and likelihoods). Studies 1 and 2 found that simplicity is also used as a direct cue to the outputs of Bayesian inference (the posterior probability of an explanation), such that simplicity affects estimates of posterior probability even after controlling for elicited (Study 1) or provided (Study 2) priors and likelihoods, with simplicity having a larger effect in Study 1, where posteriors are more uncertain and difficult to compute. Comparing Studies 1 and 2 also suggested that simplicity plays additional roles unrelated to approximating probabilities, as reflected in simplicity's effect on how "satisfying" (vs. probable) an explanation is, which remained largely unaffected by the difficulty of computing posteriors. Together, these results suggest that the virtue of simplicity is used in multiple ways to approximate probabilities (i.e., serving as a cue to priors, likelihoods, and posteriors) when these probabilities are otherwise uncertain or difficult to compute, but that the influence of simplicity also goes beyond these roles.