  In belief revision, agents typically modify their beliefs when they receive
some new piece of information that is in conflict with them. The guiding
principle behind most belief revision frameworks is that of minimalism, which
advocates minimal changes to existing beliefs. However, minimalism may not
necessarily capture the nuanced ways in which human agents reevaluate and
modify their beliefs. In contrast, the explanatory hypothesis indicates that
people are inherently driven to seek explanations for inconsistencies, thereby
striving for explanatory coherence rather than minimal changes when revising
beliefs. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold. Motivated by the
explanatory hypothesis, we first present a novel, yet simple belief revision
operator that, given a belief base and an explanation for an explanandum, it
revises the belief bases in a manner that preserves the explanandum and is not
necessarily minimal. We call this operator explanation-based belief revision.
Second, we conduct two human-subject studies to empirically validate our
approach and investigate belief revision behavior in real-world scenarios. Our
findings support the explanatory hypothesis and provide insights into the
strategies people employ when resolving inconsistencies.
