Illusion of Explanatory Depth

The illusion of explanatory depth is the tendency for people to believe they understand how something works, such as a mechanical device, natural phenomenon or policy, in far more mechanistic detail than they actually do, a mistaken confidence that is often revealed only when they are asked to produce a detailed, step-by-step explanation. The psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil documented the effect in a 2002 study, in which participants who initially rated their understanding of everyday devices such as a zipper or a flush toilet highly gave substantially lower self-ratings after attempting to write out a detailed causal explanation of how the device worked. The effect has since been extended to research on understanding of political policies, where merely attempting to generate a detailed explanation has been shown to reduce the extremity of a person's political attitudes by exposing the gaps in their actual understanding.