Toward nonprobabilistic explanations of learning and decision-making

Referring to probabilistic concepts (such as randomness, sampling, and probability distributions among others) is commonplace in contemporary explanations of how people learn and make decisions in the face of environmental unknowns. Here, we critically evaluate this practice and argue that such concepts should only play a relatively minor part in psychological explanations. To make this point, we provide a theoretical analysis of what people need to do in order to deal with unknown aspects of a typical decision-making task (a repeated-choice gamble). This analysis reveals that the use of probabilistic concepts in psychological explanations may and often does conceal essential, nonprobabilistic steps that people need to take to attempt to solve the problems that environmental unknowns present. To give these steps a central role, we recast how people solve these problems as a type of hypothesis generation and evaluation, of which using probabilistic concepts to deal with unknowns is one of many possibilities. We also demonstrate some immediate practical consequences of our proposed approach in two experiments. This perspective implies a shift in focus toward nonprobabilistic aspects of psychological explanations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).