Sensitivity to the Sampling Process Emerges From the Principle of Efficiency

Doing things efficiently: Testing an account of why simple explanations are satisfying

People often find simple explanations more satisfying than complex ones. Across seven preregistered experiments, we provide evidence that this simplicity preference is not specific to explanations and may instead arises from a broader tendency to prefer completing goals in efficient ways. In each experiment, participants (total N=2820) learned of simple and complex methods for producing an outcome, and judged which was more appealing-either as an explanation why the outcome happened, or as a process for producing it. Participants showed similar preferences across judgments. They preferred simple methods as explanations and processes in tasks with no statistical information about the reliability or pervasiveness of causal elements. But when this statistical information was provided, preferences for simple causes often diminished and reversed in both kinds of judgments. Together, these findings suggest that people may assess explanations much in the same ways they assess methods for completing goals, and that both kinds of judgments depend on the same cognitive mechanisms.

Quantitative mental state attributions in language understanding

Human social intelligence relies on our ability to infer other people’s mental states such as their beliefs, desires, and intentions. While people are proficient at mental state inference from physical action, it is unknown whether people can make inferences of comparable granularity from simple linguistic events. Here, we show that people can make quantitative mental state attributions from simple referential expressions, replicating the fine-grained inferential structure characteristic of nonlinguistic theory of mind. Moreover, people quantitatively adjust these inferences after brief exposures to speaker-specific speech patterns. These judgments matched the predictions made by our computational model of theory of mind in language, but could not be explained by a simpler qualitative model that attributes mental states deductively. Our findings show how the connection between language and theory of mind runs deep, with their interaction showing in one of the most fundamental forms of human communication: reference.