As a teenager growing up in Toronto, Thalia Vrantsidis often sought out popular books on physics, relativity and quantum mechanics from her high-school library and spent her time poring over them in search of deeper perspectives. Reading about complex subjects such as the curvature of spacetime or the source of gravity gave her deeper insights into everyday life and shifted how she viewed daily goings-on and the world around her.
While pursuing an undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Toronto, one of Vrantsidis’ professors delivered a lecture on the concept of insight and how it could lead a person to what he termed a “mystical experience,” in which seeing how concepts are connected can make someone feel at one with the universe.
The idea resonated with Vrantsidis, who took to drawing what she called “mind maps” on paper dealing with insight. She would place an idea in the center of the map and draw lines connecting insights to things people valued, such as the idea of mutual understanding in a relationship and how people processed their own emotions.
“Learning about those aspects of psychology shifted how I viewed things and I wanted to know more,” Vrantsidis told the Mississippi Free Press. “I looked at my own values and things I found interesting and then started wanting to know about the idea of understanding itself. I wanted to know what makes for a good explanation of a subject and find out about what people are looking for when they try to understand something. I found that people often wanted that understanding in simpler terms.”
Vrantsidis’ ensuing research on human understanding eventually led her to write a paper on the subject of why people often favor simpler explanations even if a more complex explanation would more accurately describe a situation. Vrantsidis’ paper, titled “Inside Ockham’s razor: A mechanism driving preferences for simpler explanations,” earned her the Psychonomic Society’s 2025 Best Article Award.
The Psychonomic Society, an international organization focused on cognitive psychology, awarded Vrantsidis a $1,000 prize for her paper, announcing the win at a ceremony in Denver, Colorado, in November 2025.
Vrantsidis, a Starkville resident who works as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University’s Department of Psychology, coauthored her paper with Tania Lombrozo, her former postdoctoral supervisor at Princeton University.
‘Take a More Detailed Look at Things’
In exploring why people prefer simpler explanations even when one may not be the most accurate, Vrantsidis presents a hypothetical scenario where a person who is sick displays two symptoms that could come from several different diseases.
Disease A in the scenario can cause both symptoms and would therefore be the “simple solution” that most people would latch onto. A scenario people often don’t consider, Vrantsidis writes, is that there could be a Disease B that causes the sick person’s first symptom and Disease C that causes the second. People asked to evaluate the scenario and decide whether they think that Disease A was responsible or that Disease B and C combined caused the symptoms overwhelmingly concluded they believed Disease A to be the ultimate cause, her research showed.
“While Disease A is oftentimes more probable in this situation, the fact remains that people will gravitate toward this type of simple explanation even in cases where it isn’t as likely to be correct,” Vrantsidis explained.
‘Simplify(ing) Their Mental Model’
A key element in Vrantsidis’ research is what she terms absent or unmentioned causes and how they can lead to oversimplification as people search for explanations. In a situation where patients are in a hospital where all three diseases are common, Vrantsidis said, it becomes objectively more likely for patients to have multiple diseases, making the two-disease explanation more likely.
“My paper shows that because people ignore absences. In this situation they don’t consider how likely it is for someone to not have the two separate diseases,” Vrantsidis said. “They only focus on the causes that are present, only thinking of the likelihood of having Disease A rather than B and C even in a situation like this. It seems like people try to simplify their mental model and represent as few causes as possible in their thinking.”
While Vrantsidis’ paper is more focused on the phenomenon itself than possible solutions to it, she emphasizes the importance of analyzing everything happening around you and being on the lookout for underlying causes that may not be obvious rather than defaulting to a simpler explanation that may turn out to be wrong.
“Being able to step back and take a more detailed look at things can get you a lot more insight,” Vrantsidis said. “I think gaining insight about something makes us feel like we’ve obtained something valuable. People look for simple explanations because they want to feel like they understand something. People want to make sense of the world in an accessible way and be able to relate things to their lives.”
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