Conference Proceedings

Scientific norms value skepticism; many religious traditions value faith. We test the hypothesis that these different attitudes towards inquiry and belief result in different inferences from epistemic behavior: Whereas the pursuit of evidence or explanations is taken as a signal of commitment to science, forgoing further evidence and explanation is taken as a signal of commitment to religion. Two studies (N = 401) support these predictions. We also find that deciding to pursue inquiry is judged more moral and trustworthy, with moderating effects of participant religiosity and scientism. These findings suggest that epistemic behavior can be a social signal, and shed light on the epistemic and social functions of scientific vs. religious belief.

Research has found that when children or adults attempt to explain novel observations in the course of learning, they are more likely to discover patterns that support ideal explanations: explanations that are maximally simple and broad. However, not all learning contexts support such explanations. Can explaining facilitate discovery nonetheless? We present a study in which participants were tasked with discovering a rule governing the classification of items, where the items were consistent two non-ideal rules: one correctly classified 66% of cases, the other 83%. We find that when there is no ideal rule to be discovered (i.e., no 100% rule), participants prompted to explain are better than control participants at discovering the best available rule (i.e., the 83% rule). This supports the idea that seeking ideal explanations can be beneficial in a non-ideal world because the pursuit of an ideal explanation can facilitate the discovery of imperfect patterns along the way.

Both science and religion offer explanations for everyday events, but they differ with respect to their tolerance for mysteries. In the present research, we investigate laypeople's perceptions about the extent to which religious and scientific questions demand an explanation and the extent to which an appeal to mystery can satisfy that demand. In Study 1, we document a large domain difference between science and religion: scientific questions are judged to be more in need of explanation and less appropriately answered by appeal to mystery than religious questions. In Study 2, we demonstrate that these differences are not driven by differing levels of belief in the content of these domains. While the source of these domain differences remains unclear, we propose several hypotheses in the General Discussion.

Much of human learning throughout the lifespan is achieved through seeking and generating explanations. However, very little is known about what triggers a learner to seek an explanation. In two studies, we investigate what makes a given event or phenomenon stand in need of explanation. In Study 1, we show that a learner's judgment of "need for explanation" for a given question predicts that learner's likelihood of seeking an answer to this question. In Study 2, we explore several potential predictors of need for explanation. We find that the need for explanation is greater for questions expected to have useful answers that require expert understanding, and that "need for explanation" can be differentiated from general curiosity. 

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social environment be leveraged to induce curiosity and facilitate subsequent learning? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Our findings show that people are more likely to become curious about the answers to more popular questions, which in turn influences the information they choose to reveal. Given that curiosity has been linked to better learning, these findings have important implications for education.

Explanations often highlight inductively rich relationships that support further generalizations: learning that the knife is sharp because it is for cutting, we correspondingly infer that other things for cutting might also be sharp. When do children appreciate that explanations are good guides to generalization? We report a study in which 108 4- to 7-year-old children evaluated mechanistic, functional, and categorical explanations for the properties of objects, and subsequently generalized those properties to novel objects on the basis of shared mechanisms, functions, or category membership. Older children, but not younger children, were significantly more likely to generalize when the explanation they had received matched the subsequent basis for generalization (e.g., generalizing on the basis of a shared mechanism after hearing a mechanistic explanation). These findings shed light on how explanation and generalization become coordinated in development, as well as the role of explanations in young children’s learning.

How does actively seeking explanations for one’s observations affect information search over the course of learning? Generating explanations could plausibly lead learners to take advantage of the information they have already obtained, resulting in less exploration. Alternatively, explaining could lead learners to explore more, especially after encountering evidence that suggests their current beliefs are incorrect. In two experiments using a modified observe or bet task, we investigate these possibilities and find support for the latter: participants who are prompted to explain their observations in the course of learning tend to explore more, especially after encountering evidence that challenges a current belief.

Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. Here we explore whether children and adults are able to understanding category-property associations in structural terms, locating an object of explanation within a larger structure and identifying structural constraints that act on elements of the structure. We show that children as young 3-4 years of age show signs of structural thinking, but that this capacity does not fully develop until after 7 years of age. These findings introduce a viable alternative to internalist accounts of social categories, such as psychological essentialism.
 

Three experiments investigate whether and why people accept explanations for symptoms that appeal to mental disorders, such as: “She experiences delusions because she has schizophrenia.” Such explanations are potentially puzzling, as mental disorder diagnoses are made on the basis of symptoms rather than causes. Do laypeople nonetheless conceptualize mental disorder classifications in causal terms? Or is this an instance of non-causal explanation? Experiment 1 shows that such explanations are found explanatory. Experiment 2 presents participants with novel disorders that are stipulated to involve or not involve an underlying cause across symptoms and people. Disorder classifications are found more explanatory when a causal basis is stipulated, or when participants infer that one is present (even after it’s denied in the text). Finally, Experiment 3 finds that merely having a principled, but non-causal, basis for defining symptom clusters is insufficient to reach the explanatory potential of categories with a stipulated common cause.