Hussak Larisa J, Cimpian Andrei
University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA.
New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2018 Jan;46(1):68-88. doi: 10.3758/s13421-017-0746-8.
People understand the world by constructing explanations for what they observe. It is thus important to identify the cognitive processes underlying these judgments. According to a recent proposal, everyday explanations are often constructed heuristically: Because people need to generate explanations on a moment-by-moment basis, they cannot perform an exhaustive search through the space of possible reasons, but may instead use the information that is most easily accessible in memory (Cimpian & Salomon 2014a, b). In the present research, we tested two key claims of this proposal that have so far not been investigated. First, we tested whether-as previously hypothesized-the information about an entity that is most accessible in memory tends to consist of inherent or intrinsic facts about that entity, rather than extrinsic (contextual, historical, etc.) facts about it (Studies 1 and 2). Second, we tested the implications of this difference in the memory accessibility of inherent versus extrinsic facts for the process of generating explanations: Does the fact that inherent facts are more accessible than relevant extrinsic facts give rise to an inherence bias in the content of the explanations generated (Studies 3 and 4)? The findings supported the proposal that everyday explanations are generated in part via a heuristic process that relies on easily accessible-and often inherent-information from memory.
人们通过对所观察到的事物构建解释来理解世界。因此，识别这些判断背后的认知过程很重要。根据最近的一项提议，日常解释通常是通过启发式方法构建的：由于人们需要时刻生成解释，他们无法在可能的原因空间中进行详尽的搜索，而是可能使用记忆中最容易获取的信息（辛皮安和萨洛蒙，2014a，b）。在本研究中，我们测试了该提议中两个尚未被研究的关键主张。首先，我们测试了——如先前假设的那样——记忆中最容易获取的关于某个实体的信息是否倾向于由该实体的内在或固有事实组成，而不是关于它的外在（情境、历史等）事实（研究1和2）。其次，我们测试了固有事实与外在事实在记忆可及性上的这种差异对解释生成过程的影响：固有事实比相关外在事实更容易获取这一事实是否会导致所生成解释的内容出现固有性偏差（研究3和4）？研究结果支持了这样一种提议，即日常解释部分是通过一种启发式过程生成的，该过程依赖于记忆中容易获取且通常是固有的信息。
