Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children and adults prefer simpler to more complex explanations, a penchant they share with scientists and philoso-phers. While the preference has been widely remarked, its mechanisms and justification remain contested (Kitcher1987,Lombrozo 2007, Lombrozo2015). Explanations for the simplicity preference have included over-hypotheses, resourcerationality, pragmatic justifications, and quirks of the hypothesis generation process. We present a model of key resultsfrom Pacer and Lombrozo (Pacer2017) and show that one form of the simplicity bias can be explained on probabilisticgrounds alone. This modeling work provides an explanation for one manifestation of the simplicity bias, and allows usto formalize questions within the ’Explanation for Best Inference’ Framework (Lombrozo2015), asking explicitly whatmakes the best explanation ’best.’