Three experiments investigate whether and why people accept explanations for symptoms that appeal to mental disorders, such as: “She experiences delusions because she has schizophrenia.” Such explanations are potentially puzzling, as mental disorder diagnoses are made on the basis of symptoms, and the DSM implicitly rejects a commitment to some common, underlying cause. Do laypeople nonetheless conceptualize mental disorder classifications in causal terms? Or is this an instance of non-causal explanation? Experiment 1 shows that such explanations are indeed found explanatory. Experiment 2 presents participants with novel disorders that are stipulated to involve or not involve an underlying cause across symptoms and people. Disorder classifications are found more explanatory when a causal basis is stipulated, or when participants infer that one is present (even after it’s denied in the text). Finally, Experiment 3 finds that merely having a principled, but non-causal, basis for defining symptom clusters is insufficient to reach the explanatory potential of categories with a stipulated common cause. We discuss the implications for accounts of explanation and for psychiatry.

Do people evaluate the quality of explanations differently depending on their goals? In particular, are explanations of different kinds (formal, mechanistic, teleological) judged differently depending on the future judgments the evaluator anticipates making? We report two studies demonstrating that the perceived “goodness” of explanations depends on the evaluator’s current goals, with explanations receiving a relative boost when they are based on relationships that support anticipated judgments. These findings shed light on the functions of explanation and support pragmatic and pluralist approaches to explanation.