Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What makes an explanation satisfying? Much work hasinvestigated explanatory preferences for things like animalsand artifacts, but how do explanation preferences manifest ineveryday life? Here, we focus on the criminal justice system asa case study. In this domain, outcomes critically depend on howmembers of the system (e.g., lawyers, jurors) generate andinterpret explanations. We investigate lay preferences for twodifferent classes of explanations: those that appeal to‘mechanistic’ aspects of a crime (i.e., how the culpritcommitted the crime) vs. ‘teleological’ aspects of that crime(i.e., the purpose of the crime). In two experiments, wedemonstrate that people have a systematic preference for'motive' accounts of crimes (analogous to a teleologypreference) at different stages of the investigative process. Wediscuss these findings in light of a broad literature on thecognitive basis of explanation preferences. We also discussimplications for the criminal justice system.