Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What makes an explanation better than another explanation? Previous studies have suspected that explanatory virtues,such as Simplicity and Scope, affect individuals’ evaluation of the explanatory goodness. Although almost all of thesestudies have focused on the situation that some explanations are presented simultaneously, we do not always obtain someexplanations in daily life. In this research, we conducted an experiment to investigate the preference change in causalexplanation between Joint and Separate Evaluations. The results showed that Latent scope has a large effect as a criterionfor evaluating explanatory goodness regardless of Joint and Separate Evaluation. Furthermore, Simplicity affects theevaluation of explanatory goodness differently between these situations of evaluation; however, the effect of comparisonwas observed only by online reflection in which evaluation is performed for two explanations simultaneously and not byoffline reflection in which evaluation is re-performed after ending all evaluations.