Phil Fernbach

That's right, Shankar.

The illusion of explanatory depth or the illusion of understanding is the very human tendency to feel like we understand things in a lot more depth and complexity than we actually do, to treat the world as much more simple than it actually is.

That's exactly right.

In a typical study, what you would do is ask people their initial feeling of how well they understand some object or phenomenon or process.

Typically, as you just mentioned, what people feel is that they understand it in some depth.

But then the trick is you ask them to explain it in detail how it actually works.

And what then typically happens is people realize that they don't understand it as well as they had initially thought.

Their feeling of understanding decreases.

Their assessment of how well they understand it decreases.

They become a little bit humbled.

Sure.

This is the sort of jargony way that cognitive scientists talk about this.

Explanatory depth means the depth with which you can explain some phenomenon.

And we have an illusion that we can explain things more deeply than we can.

So if I ask you about pretty much anything, you mentioned toilets and we talked about that previously.

People feel like they have sort of an annotated plumbing diagram somewhere in their minds, but they don't.

So they feel like they can explain it in some depth and then you say, oh, how does it actually work?

And they go, hmm.

Well, I guess you push the handle down and it flushes.

So that's the typical pattern.