Explanation, imagination, and confidence in judgment.

Abstract

This article concerns a class of experimental manipulations that require people to generate explanations or imagine scenarios. A review of studies using such manipulations indicates that people who explain or imagine a possibility then express greater confidence in the truth of that possibility. It is argued that this effect results from the approach people take in the explanation or imagination task: They temporarily assume that the hypothesis is true and assess how plausibly it can account for the relevant evidence. From this view, any task that requires that a hypothesis be treated as if it were true is sufficient to increase confidence in the truth of that hypothesis. Such tasks cause increased confidence in the hypothesis at the expense of viable alternatives because of changes in problem representation, evidence evaluation, and information search that take place when the hypothesis is temporarily treated as if it were true.

Heroic Memory: Remembering the Details of Others' Heroism in the Aftermath of a Traumatic Public Event Can Foster Our Own Prosocial Response

“…These findings are consistent with previous research related to imagination inflation (Garry & Polaschek, 2000;Hyman & Pentland, 1996;Husnu & Crisp, 2010;Mazzoni & Memon, 2003, see also D'Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2012 and related work showing that directly manipulating vividness can enhance the perceived probability of imagined events occurring in the future (Szpunar & Schacter, 2013). As the remembered or imagined helping episode is more vividly experienced, the helping event becomes more accessible (Anderson, 1983;Koehler, 1991;Tversky & Kahneman, 1973), providing 'evidentiary value' (Kappes & Morewedge, 2016) that one is willing to help in that situation. In other words, when deciding whether to help in a situation, being able to vividly remember or imagine related helping episodes informs one's judgment of whether one would help in that situation.…”

Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty

“…The act of explaining could increase likelihood ratings, as has been shown to occur for explaining hypothetical outcomes (e.g., Koehler, 1991), and explaining an outcome has also been found to make people less likely to detect inconsistencies (Khemlani & Johnson-Laird, 2012). So, explanation could be argued to raise the subjective probability of a low-probability event, making it less surprising.…”

Conflicts Of Interest And The Case Of Auditor Independence: Moral Seduction And Strategic Issue Cycling

“…They focus on evidence that supports the conclusion they would like to reach (Holyoak & Simon, 1999;Koehler, 1991;Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979;Russo, Medvec, & Meloy, 1996;Russo, Meloy, & Medvec, 1998;see Rabin & Schrag, 1999, for a theoretical model). When they cannot ignore conflicting evidence, they often subject it to additional critical scrutiny (Gilovich, 1991).…”