| Popis: |
People often overestimate their understanding of how things work. For instance, people believe they can explain even ordinary phenomena such as the operation of zippers and speedometers in greater depth than they really can. This is called the illusion of explanatory depth. Fortunately, a person can expose the illusion by attempting to generate a causal explanation for how the phenomenon operates (e.g., how a zipper works). Researchers have assumed for two decades that explanation exposes the illusion because explanation makes salient the gaps in a person’s knowledge of that phenomenon. However, recent evidence suggests that people might be able to expose the illusion by instead explaining a different phenomenon. If true, this would challenge our fundamental understanding of how the illusion works. Across three preregistered studies we tested whether the process of explaining one phenomenon (e.g., how a zipper works) would lead someone to report knowing less about a completely different phenomenon (e.g., how snow forms). In each study we found that explaining led people to report knowing less about various phenomena, regardless of what was explained. For example, people reported knowing less about how snow forms after attempting to explain how a zipper works. We discuss alternative accounts of the illusion of explanatory depth that might better fit our results. We also consider the utility of explanation as an indirect, non-confrontational debiasing method in which a person generalizes a feeling of ignorance about one phenomenon to their knowledge base more generally. |
