The Plausibility Gap: A model of sensemaking

When people make plausibility judgments about an assertion, an event, or a piece of evidence, they are gauging whether it makes sense. Therefore, we can treat plausibility judgments as sensemaking activities. In this paper, we review the research literature, presenting the different ways that plausibility has been defined and measured. Then we describe the research program that allowed us to formulate our sensemaking perspective on plausibility. The model is based on an analysis of 23 cases, most of which involved understanding and interacting with information technology. The resulting model describes the user’s attempts to construct a narrative as a state transition string, relying on plausibility judgments.