Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Decisions often rely on judgments about the probabilitiesof various explanations. Recent research has uncovered ahost of biases that afflict explanatory inference: Wouldthese biases also translate into decision-making? We findthat although people show biased inferences when makingexplanatory judgments in decision-relevant contexts (Exp.1A), these biases are attenuated or eliminated when thechoice context is highlighted by introducing an economicframing (price information; Exp. 1B–1D). However, biasedinferences can be “locked in” to subsequent decisions whenthe judgment and decision are separated in time (Exp. 2).Together, these results suggest that decisions can be morerational than the corresponding judgments—leading tochoices that are rational in the output of the decisionprocess, yet irrational in their incoherence with judgments.