Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A labels entrenchment, its degree of use by members of a community, affects its perceived explanatory value even ifthe label provides no substantive information (Hemmatian & Sloman, 2018). Here we show that entrenched psychiatricand non-psychiatric diagnostic labels are seen by laypersons and mental health professionals as better explanations evenif circular. This preference is not attributable to conversational norms, reflectiveness or attentiveness, and the recipientsunfamiliarity with the label. In Experiment 1, whether a label provided novel symptom information had no impact onlaypersons’ responses, while its entrenchment enhanced ratings of explanation quality. The effect persisted in Experiment2 for incoherent random categories and regardless of provided mechanistic information. The entrenchment manipula-tion induced causal beliefs about the category even when respondents were informed that no causal relation exists. Wereplicate the effect in Experiment 3 with mental health professionals despite a marked tendency to find all uninformativeexplanations unsatisfactory.