University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The influence of an inherence heuristic on scientific explanation

Horne, Zachary S

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

Description

Title
The influence of an inherence heuristic on scientific explanation
Author(s)
Horne, Zachary S
Issue Date
2017-06-07
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Cimpian, Andrei
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Cimpian, Andrei
Committee Member(s)
  • Hummel, John
  • Pomerantz, Eva
  • Brewer, William
  • Hyde, Daniel
  • Livengood, Jonathan
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Explanation
  • Psychology
  • Reasoning
  • Heuristics
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.
Graduation Semester
2017-08
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/98226
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2017 Zachary Horne

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