Testimony, Credibility, and Explanatory Coherence

Thagard Testimony , Credibility , and Explanatory Coherence

This paper develops a descriptive and normative account of how people respond to testimony. It postulates a default pathway in which people more or less automatically respond to a claim by accepting it, as long as the claim made is consistent with their beliefs and the source is credible. Otherwise, people enter a reflective pathway in which they evaluate the claim based on its explanatory cohe...

Uncertainty can increase explanatory credibility

In daily conversations, what information do people use to assess their conversational partner’s explanations? We explore how a metacognitive cue, in particular the partner’s confidence or uncertainty, can modulate the credibility of an explanation. Two experiments showed that explanations are accepted more often when delivered by an uncertain conversational partner. Participants in Experiment 1...

Probabilistic Networks and Explanatory Coherence

Causal reasoning can be understood qualitatively in terms of explanatory coherence or quantitatively in terms of probability theory. Comparison of these approaches can be done by looking at computational models, using my explanatory coherence networks and Pearl’s probabilistic ones. The explanatory coherence program ECHO can be given a probabilistic interpretation, but there are many conceptual...

Errors of recall and credibility: can omissions and discrepancies in successive statements reasonably be said to undermine credibility of testimony?

The credibility of recovered memory testimony: exploring the effects of alleged victim and perpetrator gender.

OBJECTIVE The purpose was to explore the effects of victim/complainant and perpetrator/defendant gender on the impact of recovered memory testimony in criminal sexual abuse trials. METHOD A jury simulation methodology was used. Two hundred forty-six participants read a summary of a sexual abuse trial in which the following three variables were manipulated: the complainant's gender, the defend...