Department of Psychology.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2013 Nov;142(4):1006-14. doi: 10.1037/a0030996. Epub 2013 Jan 7.
Seeking explanations is central to science, education, and everyday thinking, and prompting learners to explain is often beneficial. Nonetheless, in 2 category learning experiments across artifact and social domains, we demonstrate that the very properties of explanation that support learning can impair learning by fostering overgeneralizations. We find that explaining encourages learners to seek broad patterns, hindering learning when patterns involve exceptions. By revealing how effects of explanation depend on the structure of what is being learned, these experiments simultaneously demonstrate the hazards of explaining and provide evidence for why explaining is so often beneficial. For better or for worse, explaining recruits the remarkable human capacity to seek underlying patterns that go beyond individual observations.
寻求解释是科学、教育和日常思维的核心，促使学习者进行解释通常是有益的。然而，在涉及人工制品和社会领域的两个类别学习实验中，我们证明了支持学习的解释的特性会通过促进过度泛化而损害学习。我们发现，解释鼓励学习者寻找广泛的模式，当模式涉及例外时，学习就会受到阻碍。通过揭示解释的效果如何取决于所学内容的结构，这些实验同时展示了解释的危险，并为为什么解释通常是有益的提供了证据。无论好坏，解释都利用了人类寻找超越个人观察的潜在模式的非凡能力。
