Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In complex decision tasks the decision maker frequently constructs a summary representation of the relevant evidence in the form of a causal explanation and relies on that representation, rather than the "raw" evidence base, to select a course of action from a choice set of decision alternatives. We introduce a general model for this form of decision making, called explanation-based decision making, because of the central roleplayed by the intervening evidence summary. Several original empirical studies of judicial decision making, a prototype of the class of explanation-based decision tasks, are reviewed and the findings are adduced in support of the explanation-based decision model. In legal decision making tasks subjects spontaneously construct evidence summaries in the form of stories comprising the perceived underlying causal relationships among decision relevant events. These explanations are primary mediators (i.e., causes)of the subjects' decisions.