Justification effects on the judgment of analogy

Many of us share a strong intuition that justification forces us to better understand the situations we face. And there is substantial evidence indica ting that this is often the case. However, there is a growing body of resea rch showing that, under certain circumstances, explanation and justificatio n can impair performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. In the present re search, the effects of justification on judgment of the soundness of analog ies were examined. Subjects judged the quality of the match between pairs o f stories with varying degrees of superficial and analogical similarity Exp erimental subjects either provided reasons for their judgments or wrote rec ollections of the target stimuli. These subjects rated the match between st imulus pairs as more sound than did control subjects. Also, providing reaso ns led to poorer discrimination between superficially similar aspects of th e stimuli and analogous aspects. Explanations of these findings are propose d, and implications for problem solving and confidence judgment are discuss ed.