Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people evaluate explanations in uncertain situations, the latent scope bias occurs. It refers to the tendency to perceive explanations that do not include unobservable events as plausible. Previous studies have proposed the inferred evidence account, which states that the bias is caused by underestimating the occurrence probability of unobservable events. Additionally, this account assumes that humans use Bayesian probability reasoning in evaluating such explanations. However, previous studies on this bias have not examined the Bayesian probabilistic reasoning component. This study measured subjective probabilities of explanations and modeled the reasoning process. As a result, it was found that latent scope bias is caused by Bayesian probabilistic reasoning, compared to the inference using psychological utility. The results also suggest that there are considerable individual differences in the occurrence of latent scope bias. These results support the inferred evidence account. Future studies are required to investigate the factors causing such individual differences.