Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents an integration of two approaches to complex decision-making from very different traditions: from the psychology of jury decision, the Story Model, and from the philosophy of science, the Theory of Explanatory Coherence and its con^utational instantiation, ECHO . The subjects in Pennington & Hastie (1993) generated causal "stories" to represent the events related to a particular trial. These stories were modeled with ECHO , and ECH O reached the same verdicts as did the human subjects. The ECH O simulations were also linked to the trial testimony, which, despite the inconsistent nature of the testimony, actually increased the coherence of stories for two jurors with very different verdicts. Implications