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{
    "pk": 25551,
    "title": "Belief Utility as an Explanatory Virtue",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Our beliefs guide our actions. But do potential actions also\nguide our beliefs? Three experiments tested whether people\nuse pragmatist principles in fixing their beliefs, by\nexamining situations in which the evidence is\nindeterminate between an innocuous and a dire explanation\nthat necessitate different actions. According to classical\ndecision theory, a person should favor a prudent course of\naction in such cases, but should nonetheless be agnostic in\nbelief between the two explanations. Contradicting this\nposition, participants believed the dire explanation to be\nmore probable when the evidence was ambiguous. Further,\nwhen the evidence favored either an innocuous or a dire\nexplanation, evidence favoring the dire explanation led to\nstronger beliefs compared to evidence favoring the\ninnocuous explanation. These results challenge classic\ntheories of the relationship between belief and action,\nsuggesting that our system for belief fixation is sensitive to\nthe utility of potential beliefs for taking subsequent action",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Explanation; beliefs; causal reasoning;\ncategorization; rationality."
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0m7741jd",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Samuel",
            "middle_name": "G.B.",
            "last_name": "Johnson",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Yale University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Greeshma",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Rajeev-Kumar",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Yale University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Frank",
            "middle_name": "C",
            "last_name": "Keil",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Yale University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2015-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25551/galley/15175/download/"
        }
    ]
}