Sorry but you don’t know as much as you think you do

I’m a huge fan of Freakonomics as I think Stephen Dubner has done a superb job at helping me view the world in a different way. I recently came across one of the podcasts entitled How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379) and it blew my mind.

A few minutes into the podcast I was introduced to the concept of “The Illusion of Explanatory Depth”. Basically, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in their published paper entitled The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth prove that humans think they know a lot more about how things work than they really do.

Quoting from the paper…

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth

 

Basically, we think we know a lot more about complex things than we really do. One of the experiments asked people to explain how everyday things worked like a zipper, flush toilet, piano key, sewing machine and quartz watch for example. The participant group was Yale graduate students, so I have to assume they are well educated and intelligent.

In every instance the group over estimated their ability to explain how these devices worked and once the experiment was complete and they were exposed to expert views on how the things really worked, they all marked themselves lower on the scale in terms of understanding. You read that correctly. Yale graduate students could not expertly explain how a flush toilet worked…and I’m sorry to break it down to you, but unless you are a plumber, you are also unlikely to be able to explain in detail how a flush toilet works either!

My favourite quote from the paper is as follows…

When we try to lean on the seductively glossy surface we find the façades of our mental films are hollow card-board. 

 

I realise as you read this that I am not the right person to be able to explain the entire academic paper to you in detail as I have surface knowledge of it all. However, I am confident in the fact that I do not know everything there is to know about cognitive science.

 

I am also confident that I have no idea how a petrol engine or any kind of engine works, how to reprogram an electric gate or how to train for a swim across the English Channel. Not knowing these things is actually fine and I don’t have to pretend that I really do know. My reality is that I have deep knowledge about certain topics but surface knowledge about most. And this is perfectly fine and perfectly OK.

 

So the next time you are in a meeting and someone says something that sounds really smart and intelligent, just smile to yourself knowing that despite the delivery, this person probably doesn’t know as much about the topic than they think they do. It’s probably not their fault either. It’s just that as humans we over estimate our ability to be able to explain complex phenomena. We think we know. But we don’t. Now you know!