How Occam’s razor guides human decision-making

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 play a role in human perception and decision-making, but the nature of our presumed preference for simplicity is not understood. Here we use preregistered behavioral experiments informed by formal theories of statistical model selection to show that, when faced with uncertain evidence, human subjects exhibit preferences for particular, theoretically grounded forms of simplicity of the alternative explanations. These forms of simplicity can be understood in terms of geometrical features of statistical models treated as manifolds in the space of the probability distributions, in particular their dimensionality, boundaries, volume, and curvature. The simplicity preferences driven by these features, which are also exhibited by artificial neural networks trained to optimize performance on comparable tasks, generally improve decision accuracy, because they minimize over-sensitivity to noisy observations (i.e., overfitting). However, unlike for artificial networks, for human subjects these preferences persist even when they are maladaptive with respect to the task training and instructions. Thus, these preferences are not simply transient optimizations for particular task conditions but rather a more general feature of human decision-making. Taken together, our results imply that principled notions of statistical model complexity have direct, quantitative relevance to human and machine decision-making and establish a new understanding of the computational foundations, and behavioral benefits, of our predilection for inferring simplicity in the latent properties of our complex world.