An invisible-hand explanation explains a situation as the outcome of individual actions, without individuals intending the situation. Invisible-hand explanations have been used for decades to account for all kinds of phenomena, from segregation to traffic norms. But, they have not been studied cognitively and empirically as an intuitive explanation type. We propose and show that US-based adults intuitively prefer invisible-hand over intentional-design explanations. We first validate pairs of explanations as equally likely to cause a social phenomenon (Exp 1). We then show that given that social phenomenon, participants prefer an invisible-hand to an intentional-design explanation, and that the preference for invisible-hand explanations is also negatively linked to conspiratorial beliefs. (Exp 2). We find that when participants are asked to come up with explanations themselves, they are equally fast to come up with invisible-hand or intentional-design explanations (Exp 3), but that both they and other participants prefer the participant-generated invisible hand explanations (Exp 3 and 4). We conclude that US-based adults likely have a prior preference for invisible-hand explanations for social phenomena.

看不见的手解释将情况解释为个人行为的结果，而不是个人有意为之。几十年来，“看不见的手”解释一直被用来解释从隔离到交通规范的各种现象。但是，它们还没有作为直观的解释类型进行认知和经验研究。我们提出并表明，美国成年人直觉上更喜欢看不见的手而不是有意设计的解释。我们首先验证成对的解释是否同样有可能引起社会现象（实验 1）。然后我们表明，鉴于这种社会现象，参与者更喜欢看不见的手而不是有意设计的解释，并且对看不见的手解释的偏好也与阴谋信仰呈负相关。（实验 2）。我们发现，当参与者被要求自己提出解释时，他们同样很快地提出“看不见的手”或有意设计的解释（实验3），但他们和其他参与者都更喜欢参与者生成的“看不见的手”解释（实验 3 和 4）。我们的结论是，美国成年人可能更倾向于用看不见的手来解释社会现象。