The latent scope bias: Robust and replicable

Abstract

People appear to prefer explanations that minimize unobserved effects, a pattern known as the latent scope bias in explanatory reasoning. A recent set of studies published in Cognition argues that the bias can be elicited only in certain narrow conditions and with certain tasks, such as a forced-choice task (Stephan, 2023). This commentary assesses the robustness of the bias in two ways: it weighs the most recent discoveries against previous research, and it presents two new studies using the most general possible elicitation task, i.e., spontaneous written responses to problems designed to test for a latent scope bias. Across 35 previous studies, 7 studies published in Stephan (2023), and 2 new studies described herein, the overwhelming majority of studies showed that people preferred narrow latent scope explanations over broad ones. This analysis led us to conclude that the bias is both robust and replicable. Taken together, Stephan's (2023) contribution and our new analyses advance our understanding of explanatory reasoning behavior.