@klopfenstein
PhD candidate in cognitive science at Paris School of Economics / École normale supérieure. I do experiments to understand moral motivations and belief formation, and try to build bridges between cognitive science and econ.
This took three experiments in my master's thesis, an additional experiment and two complete rewrites during my PhD, but we're finally here! A big thanks to @hugoreasoning.bsky.social for supervising this work and sharing much knowledge in the process.
You can read the paper here: buff.ly/NaSAlaJ
Interestingly, the surprisingness ratings don't just reflect whether you already know the explanation, but they also seem to pick up whether other people know it. In fact, when asked explicitly to predict the share of other people who would know an explanation, participants performed quite well!
Graphs showing the average appeal score depending on the explanatoriness, usefulness and surprisingness ratings
We then look at three possible determinants: does the explanation explain well the "why?", is it useful, and is it surprising (which is not much linked with the first two).
We find that all three of those have comparable and sizeable effects on appeal, i.e.: explaining matters, but it's not enough.
We measure the "appeal" of an explanation by aggregating three (highly correlated) ratings: do you find the explanation interesting, do you think that the person who shared it is clever, and would you be willing to share it yourself.
In three experiments, we ask participants to rate more than 200 explanations coming from a factbook and from r/explainlikeimfive, a subreddit on which people ask "why?" questions.
Most of the everyday explanations that people have for how the world works are culturally transmitted, e.g. you did not figure by yourself that picking up food from the ground might make you sick (except under 5s). But why do some (sometimes not very good) explanations spread, and others do not?
Klopfenstein, Aurélien & Mercier, Hugo (2026) Explaining is not enough: Appealing explanations should also be surprising, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Happy to share my very first publication!
With @hugoreasoning.bsky.social, we study what drives the cultural success of explanations.
TLDR: people find surprising explanations much more appealing, and it matters about as much as whether the explanation actually explains well what it should explain.
How appealing an explanation is, is only in part down to how well it actually *explains*, research by klopfenstein.bsky.social & @hugoreasoning.bsky.social suggests.
Usefulness and surprisingness matter too, the latter especially explaining why poor explanations become popular:
buff.ly/NaSAlaJ