UCLA

In everyday life, people are adept at generating and evaluating explanations for events around them. But what makes for a satisfying explanation? While some scholars argue that individuals find simple explanations to be more satisfying (Lombrozo, 2007), others argue that complex explanations are preferred (Zemla, et al. 2017). Uniting these perspectives, we posit that people believe a satisfying explanation should be as complex as the event being explained – what we term “the complexity matching hypothesis.” Thus, individuals will prefer simple explanations for simple events, and complex explanations for complex events. Five studies provide robust evidence for the complexity-matching hypothesis. In Study 1, we re-examined existing data from previous work in the literature. Studies 2-4 provided novel experimental evidence in which participants were asked to predict the complexity of a satisfying explanation (Study 2), generate an explanation themselves (Study 3), and evaluate explanations (Study 4). Study 5 explored a different manipulation of complexity to demonstrate robustness across paradigms. Lastly, Study 6 used real-world data from Amazon.com to show the generalizability of our hypothesis.