Nick Chater (University of Warwick) - The hidden drive for sense-making

I describe a powerful human motive: the desire to make sense of our immediate experience, our life, and our world. We propose that evolution has produced a ‘drive for sense-making’ which motivates people to gather, attend to, and process information. I outline a model of our drive for sense-making and of how it is traded off against other goals.  I argue that the drive for sense-making can help to make sense of a wide range of disparate phenomena, including curiosity, boredom, ‘flow’, confirmation bias and information avoidance, aesthetics (both in art and in science), why we care about others’ beliefs, and the importance of narrative.