The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations
Title
The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations
Author
Cimpian, Andrei
Research Area
Development
Topic
Developmental Contexts
Abstract
The ability to explain enables humans to understand their world and informs much of their behavior. And yet, little is known about the psychological processes by which explanations are generated. Here, I describe a recent proposal on this topic. According to this proposal, people come up with explanations much as they come up with solutions to other complex problems—heuristically. Extensive research on human reasoning has suggested that people answer difficult questions (e.g., how satisfied are you with your life?) by retrieving simple information that comes to mind easily (e.g., I am in a good mood right now) and then using this information to construct an approximate answer. Prompts for an explanation (e.g., why do we eat eggs for breakfast?) are hypothesized to trigger a similar process. This process oversamples highly accessible facts about the entities in the observation to be explained. Owing to the organization of memory, these accessible facts are more often about the inherent features of the relevant entities (e.g., eggs have a lot of protein) than about their history, their relations to other entities, and so on. This skew toward inherence then propagates through to the final product of this heuristic process, which is typically an inherence‐based explanatory intuition (hence the name inherence heuristic). The inherence heuristic proposal sheds light on the mechanistic underpinnings of explanation and has implications for our understanding of other cognitive phenomena of societal importance (such as the tendency to explain membership in social groups in terms of deep biological “essences”).