Taylor Eric G, Landy David H, Ross Brian H
Psychology Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2012;65(7):1361-75. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2012.656664. Epub 2012 Apr 12.
Many studies of explanation have focused on higher level tasks and on how explanations draw upon relevant prior knowledge, which then helps in understanding some event or observation. However, explanations may also affect performance in simple tasks even when they include no task-relevant information. In three experiments, we show that explanations adding no task-relevant information alter performance in a sequential binary decision task. Whereas people with no explanation for why two events occurred at different rates tended to predict each outcome in proportion to their probability of occurrence (to "probability match"), people with an explanation tended to predict the more likely event more often (to "overmatch," a better strategy). These results suggest a broader view of explanation, which includes a role in shaping simple tasks outside of higher level reasoning.
许多关于解释的研究都集中在更高层次的任务上，以及解释如何利用相关的先验知识，而这些知识有助于理解某些事件或观察结果。然而，即使解释不包含任何与任务相关的信息，它们也可能影响简单任务的表现。在三项实验中，我们表明，添加不相关任务信息的解释会改变顺序二元决策任务的表现。当没有对两个事件以不同速率发生的原因进行解释时，人们倾向于根据每个结果发生的概率来预测（即“概率匹配”），而有解释的人则倾向于更频繁地预测更可能发生的事件（即“过度匹配”，这是一种更好的策略）。这些结果表明了对解释的更广泛看法，即解释在塑造高层次推理之外的简单任务中也发挥着作用。
