When individuals detect that a description is inconsistent, theorists from William James onwards have argued that a cognitive change occurs: They modify the description in a minimal way to make it consistent. We present an alternative hypothesis: Reasoners create an explanation that resolves the inconsistency, and the explanation entails a revision or reinterpretation of the description. According to this principle of resolution, revision is consequent upon explanation. Hence, when individuals have such an explanation in mind, they should be faster than otherwise to modify assertions to make them consistent. Two experiments corroborated this prediction.
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Khemlani et al. (2013) studied this question.
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