 Oh my, here you go be ready. This is one that can shake you out of your seat in explanatory fiction All right, so explanatory fictions are things that often occur in the field of psychology And many other fields even lay people's fields are non scientific fields anyway I digress so an explanatory fiction is when you're trying to explain a phenomenon using oh, I don't know a hypothetical construct see my other video on hypothetical constructs or any sort of extraneous variable that you have no direct evidence of or something like that to Explain a particular phenomenon my favorite one is intelligence It doesn't explain squat. Why do I know how to use this? I've called it a phone before but it's not why do I know? He's intelligent. How does he know behavior analysis because he's intelligent? Oh, hooey. I am no more intelligent than these lights around me I only do what I've been trained to do so in other words adding the layer of intelligence of this as an explanatory feature for my behavior Means nothing it adds no level of explanation It sounds great on the surface, but it adds no additional information for an explanation about why I'm engaging in the behaviors I am it adds nothing to the relationship as an explanation between my behavior and the environment. That's it