Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning a research outcome in class or the media may bias people towards that outcome (hindsight bias), and receiving an explanation may accentuate bias (explanation bias), both of which could hinder understanding of the necessity of replication. We tested whether providing outcomes and explanations of research findings increased difficulty of explaining alternative outcomes, and, if so, whether people were less surprised by the presented findings, and found them more likely to replicate. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers and introductory psychology students were randomly assigned to do one of the following: 1. Read details of four psychological studies without their outcomes, 2. additionally receive the outcomes, 3. additionally receive explanations of outcomes. We did not find reliable effects on difficulty of explaining alternative outcomes, and found little evidence for hindsight or explanation biases. We speculate that explaining alternative outcomes immediately after considering the actual outcomes may have debiased our participants.