People appear to exhibit a systematic bias in explanatory reasoning, called the “narrow latent scope bias”. Danny Oppenheimer, Abby Sussman and I first investigated the bias in 2011, and follow up investigations by Sam Johnson, Frank Keil, and their colleagues corroborated and extended much of what we discovered. A recent paper critiqued how robust the bias was, and it forced the four of us to reexamine our work in light of the concerns. We re-ran an old study to correct some of its flaws (Khemlani et al., 2011, Experiment 1a) and discovered that the results were robust: people continue to exhibit the bias.
A new paper out in Cognition summarizes these results. Here’s the abstract:
People appear to prefer explanations that minimize unobserved effects, a pattern known as the latent scope bias in explanatory reasoning. A recent set of studies published in Cognition argues that the bias can be elicited only in certain narrow conditions and with certain tasks, such as a forced-choice task (Stephan, 2023). This commentary assesses the robustness of the bias in two ways: it weighs the most recent discoveries against previous research, and it presents two new studies using the most general possible elicitation task, i.e., spontaneous written responses to problems designed to test for a latent scope bias. Across 35 previous studies, 7 studies published in Stephan (2023), and 2 new studies described herein, the overwhelming majority of studies showed that people preferred narrow latent scope explanations over broad ones. This analysis led us to conclude that the bias is both robust and replicable. Taken together, Stephan’s (2023) contribution and our new analyses advance our understanding of explanatory reasoning behavior.
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