Journal
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Volume 26, Issue 5, Pages 521-562Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1
Keywords
concepts; epistemology; meta-cognition; knowledge; overconfidence
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Funding
- NICHD NIH HHS [R37 HD023922-17A1, R01 HD023922, R37 HD023922] Funding Source: Medline
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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. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1-6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7-10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies I I and 12, and discuss the implications of our findings for the roles of intuitive theories in concepts and cognition. (C) 2002 Leonid Rozenblit. Published by Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
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