The illusion of understanding
The illusion of understanding
When someone is steadfastly committed to their position in an argument, the best we can do sometimes is create a bit of wiggle room in their thinking, enough to give the conversation somewhere to go.
On a scale from 1 to 7, how well do you understand how zippers work? Pick a number.
Now, describe in as much detail as possible all the steps involved in a zipper’s operation. Write them down, step by specific step. If that feels like too much effort, walk through it in your mind.
Done? On the same 1 to 7 scale, again rate your knowledge of how zippers work.
If you’re like most people, after realizing you can’t fully explain each step-by-step detail of how zippers work, you lowered your knowledge rating a point or two.
The illusion of explanatory depth
This phenomenon has a fancy name: The Illusion of Explanatory Depth (IOED). It is the tendency to have higher confidence in our knowledge about something than our actual knowledge.
The phenomenon has been explored using zippers, flush toilets, bicycles, cylinder locks, sewing machines, speedometers, and piano keys. Research participants over the years have come from all walks of life. Time and again, the results have been strikingly similar:
We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager.
Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion
The Illusion of Understanding doesn’t occur only with everyday objects. There is a similar gap between how much we really know relative to how much we think we know about tax policy, foreign relations, merit-based pay, single-payer healthcare systems, and other social and economic programs. Worse, when we surround ourselves mostly with people who agree with us, we feel even more confident in our knowledge and understanding, even when we shouldn’t be.
Why are we like this? One explanation proposes that we evolved to be cooperative to survive and that we collaborate so well it’s hard to tell where our own knowledge ends and someone else’s begins. Sloman and Fernbach wrote,
One individual may have some expertise in more than one skill, perhaps several, but never all, and never in every aspect of any one thing. No chef can cook all dishes. Though some are mighty impressive, no musician can play every instrument or every type of music. No one has ever been able to do everything. So we collaborate. That’s a major benefit of living in social groups, to make it easy to share our skills and knowledge. It’s not surprising that we fail to identify what’s in our heads versus what’s in others’, because we’re generally—perhaps always—doing things that involve both.
The Illusion of Understanding haunts our conflicts, too. We think we know.
We think we know the best solution. We believe we understand their interests, their positions, their perspectives, their character. We think we completely understand what they meant. At work and home, we seek out others who think similarly and feel even more confident in our knowledge and understanding.
Cracking open the illusion
The Illusion of Understanding may be pervasive, but it’s also surprisingly easy to counteract.
It’s remarkable how easy it is to disabuse people of their illusion; you merely have to ask them for an explanation.
Sloman and Fernbach
We counteract the Illusion of Understanding with this simple question: How does that work? For example:
How does a policy like that work? Walk me through it.
Help me understand how that initiative works exactly.
How will a financial arrangement like that play out?
Could you walk me through how your solution works?
As I was drafting this article, my husband was frustrated by our young dog Dora, who was adopted feral from the streets of Puerto Rico and who has a host of fear-related challenges that have stretched us despite our long history of adopting dogs others didn’t know what to do with. She is our third street dog.
I started to suggest ways we could help her manage her panic on smooth surfaces (wood floors and tile in a house of wood floors and tile) when he declared, “That dog is just going to have to fix herself!”
Of course, I immediately wanted to push back on that idea. Luckily, this article was very much on my mind. So instead, I said, “How does that work? I’m open to thinking that through.”
He paused to think, then grinned. “Right. Yeah. Dumb thing to say.” Instead of many minutes of a verbal tug-of-war, we had 15 seconds of amiable interchange and could move on to figuring out some new strategies.
Attitude and tone matter with this approach, of course. If you ask them to explain themselves as though you’re throwing down the gauntlet, they will likely respond to your pressure by pressing back. Remember, this isn’t about proving them wrong. It’s about creating some wiggle room in their thinking so the conversation has somewhere to go.
So summon your curiosity and try to be open to what they do know as well as what they don’t. A side benefit of this approach is that you may learn something that shifts your thinking, not just theirs.
Cognitive scientists Leon Rozenblit and Frank Keil, who are credited with early work on the Illusion of Explanatory Depth and are also the source of the three questions I asked you at the start of this article, noted,
Many participants reported genuine surprise and new humility at how much less they knew than they originally thought.
Over to you
Journal, conversation, or comment prompts:
Are there times when you fall into the illusion of knowledge trap? In what circumstances or settings is that most likely to happen?
What silos or tribes of like-minded people are you part of that increase the likelihood of this thinking error?