Approaching issues through the lens of nonnegotiable values increases the perceived intractability of debate (Baron & Spranca in

A label’s entrenchment, its degree of use by members of a community, affects its perceived explanatory value even if the label provides no substantive information (Hemmatian & Sloman, 2018). In three experiments, we show that laypersons and mental health professionals see entrenched psychiatric and non-psychiatric diagnostic labels as better explanations than non-entrenched labels even if they are circular. Using scenarios involving experts who discuss unfamiliar diagnostic categories, we show that this preference is not due to violations of conversational norms, lack of reflectiveness or attentiveness, and the characters’ familiarity or unfamiliarity with the label. In Experiment 1, whether a label provided novel symptom information or not had no impact on lay responses, while its entrenchment enhanced ratings of explanation quality. The effect persisted in Experiment 2 for causally incoherent categories and regardless of direct provision of mechanistic information. The effect of entrenchment was partly related to induced causal beliefs about the category, even when participants were informed there is no causal relation. Most participants in both experiments did not report any effect of entrenchment and the effect was present for those who did not. In Experiment 3, mental health professionals showed the effect using diagnoses that were mere shorthands for symptoms, despite a tendency to rate all explanations as unsatisfactory. The data suggest that bringing experts’ attention to the manipulation eliminates the effect. We discuss practical implications for mental health disciplines and potential ways to mitigate the impact of entrenchment.

What are the criteria that people use to evaluate everyday explanations? This chapter focuses on simplicity, coherence, and unification. It considers various operationalizations of each construct within the context of explanations to measure how people respond to them. With regard to simplicity, some of the psychological literature suggests that people do have a preference for simple explanations that have few causes, but the authors find that a more complete assessment shows that this preference is moderated by a number of factors when evaluating everyday explanations. For one, people prefer explanations that elaborate on causal mechanisms and provide a greater sense of understanding, even if this increases complexity. Measures of coherence are highly predictive of explanation quality. Moreover, people prefer explanations that cohere with the evidence. But the meaning of coherence remains mysterious; it seems to be a placeholder for a complex system of evaluation. There is surprisingly little evidence that people value unification in the form of abstract explanation. Indeed, people often respond positively to extraneous detail. Detail may enhance our understanding of particular events and might help us better visualize mechanisms. The authors also find that people prefer explanations that use words entrenched in a community even if the explanation offers no real information. The authors conclude that people are not merely intuitive philosophers. How a person evaluates an explanation depends on what that person is trying to achieve.

What are the criteria that people use to evaluate everyday explanations? We focus on simplicity, coherence, and unification. We consider various operationalizations of each construct within the context of explanations to measure how people respond to them. With regard to simplicity, some of the psychological literature suggests that people do have a preference for simple explanations that have few causes, but we find that a more complete assessment shows that this preference is moderated by a number of factors when evaluating everyday explanations. For one, people prefer explanations that elaborate on causal mechanisms and provide a greater sense of understanding, even if this increases complexity. Measures of coherence are highly predictive of explanation quality. Moreover, people prefer explanations that cohere with the evidence. But the meaning of coherence remains mysterious; it seems to be a placeholder for a complex system of evaluation. There is surprisingly little evidence that people value unification in the form of abstract explanation. Indeed, people often respond positively to extraneous detail. Detail may enhance our understanding of particular events and might help us better visualize mechanisms. We also find that people prefer explanations that use words entrenched in a community even if the explanation offers no real information. We conclude that people are not merely intuitive philosophers. How a person evaluates an explanation depends on what that person is trying to achieve.