Shankar Vedantam

It's great to be with you again, Shankar.

So, Phil, to recap a couple of things from our last conversation, one core idea that psychologists like you study is that we think we know more than we do.

How so?

And psychologists have conducted a number of experiments to demonstrate this because, of course, if you ask me, do I know how something works, I'm going to tell you, yeah, I'm pretty sure I know how it works.

But you and others have run experiments to actually test whether people like me actually know what we think we know.

So a second ago, Phil, you used a phrase, the illusion of explanatory depth.

And in some ways, this describes the illusion you were just talking about.

But can you unpack that phrase for me, please?

One of the important points that you and others make is that this illusion is not necessarily a flaw, that in some ways the mind is designed to discard details, that we are generalists, not specialists.

Can you talk about this idea?

Why is the mind designed in some ways to extract general information about something and to discard the details?

In other words, if you were a forager, for example, and you were living by your wits and living off the land and you wanted to know what plants to eat and what plants not to eat, you don't actually need to have the deep knowledge of a botanist to understand how different plant species evolved over time and the details of plant cellular structure.

You really need only just a few general rules that can keep you healthy and not have you eat something that makes you sick.

Can you talk about the idea that because we're often embedded in communities of experts, people know things.

There's someone in my community who knows a lot more about my toilet than I do, and someone in my community who knows a lot more about house construction than I do, and somebody who knows a lot more about building computers than I do, that in some ways this rubs off on us because we're surrounded by people who know how to do all these things.

That adds in some ways to our illusion of knowledge that all this knowledge somehow is ours.

I'm wondering, Phil, if this might be, you know, in some ways related to what people sometimes call the Google effect, which is that I can Google everything and I can come up with answers to seemingly everything.

And therefore, I kind of think I know everything.

So we received an email from a listener named Dennis who wrote that in his experience, the more people know about a subject, the more they realize how much they actually do not know.

In other words, expertise makes us humble and more likely to recognize the limits of our knowledge.