How Occam's razor guides human decision-making

Abstract

Occam's razor is the principle that, all else being equal, simpler explanations should be preferred over more complex ones. This principle is thought to guide human decision-making, but the nature of this guidance is not known. Here we used preregistered behavioral experiments to show that people tend to prefer the simpler of two alternative explanations for uncertain data. These preferences align quantitatively with predictions of formal theories of model selection that penalize excessive flexibility. These penalties emerge when considering not just the best explanation but the integral over all possible, relevant explanations. We further show that these simplicity preferences persist in humans, but not in certain artificial neural networks, even when they are maladaptive. Our results imply that principled notions of statistical model selection, including integrating over possible, latent causes to avoid overfitting to noisy data, may play a central role in human decision-making.