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Have you ever been baffled by how someone can believe a conspiracy theory that obviously doesn’t hold together? Well, flip that around for a second and think about yourself: Do you really understand all the things that you have strong opinions or beliefs about? Chances are, you don’t. This is the “illusion of explanatory depth.” It happens when we think we have a deep understanding of a subject, but if you were to ask us to explain it, we’d hit a wall basically immediately.
What is explanatory depth?
As a paper describing the subject puts it: “People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do.”
This illusion can apply to what you believe about political or social causes, for example. Maybe you’re excited to volunteer or donate for something, but that’s based more on feelings and opinions than a full understanding of the issue. One study asked people to explain the policies around a strong political opinion. After attempting their explanation, most people were less interested in donating to the cause.
It can also apply to technical knowledge: Maybe you think you understand how cars work, but you really just know how to do some maintenance procedures and what the major parts are called.
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For a quick demonstration of this, draw a picture of a bicycle, making sure to include all the major parts that hold it together and make it go. You know what a bicycle looks like, right? Easy. Now, when you’re done, go look up a photo of a bicycle. Chances are, you failed.
One more example: Think about an exam you aced in school, despite having no real expertise in the underlying concepts. You can say things about the subject—maybe even correct things—but that doesn’t mean you understand it. OK, the mitochondria are the “powerhouses of the cell,” but why do they exist? How big are they? Do all living things have them? If you wanted to find a mitochondrion, where in your body would you look?
How to break the illusion
If you’ve heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you might see where I’m going with this: When we don’t know much, it’s hard to realize just how little we know. As one of the first papers describing this effect points out, even if you try explaining things to yourself, explanations are open-ended. You might just repeat what you heard about the subject, and since that convinced you, you think you’re done.
What can help more is to either talk your explanation over with a friend, or at least imagine the questions that somebody else would ask. What parts are missing from your explanation? How did the situation you’re describing come to exist? How do we know that the things you’re describing are true?
How to use this in conversations
While much of the literature on explanatory depth points out how faulty our own reasoning can be, we often find ourselves talking to someone else who, we’re sure, doesn’t understand what they’re talking about.
It’s pretty well understood at this point that you can’t just explain your viewpoint to somebody, and expect them to fully embrace it. As the saying goes, you can’t reason somebody else out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.
But you could always ask them to explain their theory to you. If you do this, don’t argue with each thing they say; that’s not the point. Encourage them to explore their own knowledge of the topic. Who puts the 5G chips into the vaccine vials? How do we know that everyone with green eyes is a secret lizard person? Often, the person will have parts of the explanation memorized, but if you ask them to connect multiple layers of it (how does this action benefit the person who is supposedly doing it?) they have an opportunity to recognize that gap.
This isn’t a foolproof debate tactic, especially if you approach it as a way of winning an argument. Your partner may just change the subject whenever they feel stumped, or google until they find a bit of nonsense that appears to cover that gap. Instead, use it with someone you can be friendly with. Breaking the illusion means admitting ignorance, and that’s hard to do under pressure.
