Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The tendency to overestimate one’s knowledge has been shown in many domains including the innerworkings of everyday objects. This Illusion of Explanatory Depth (IOED) can be broken through the act of generating a causal explanation, although the reason as to why has yet to be explored. In this study, we investigate what characteristics of a generated explanation result in people recognizing their perceived lack of knowledge. Participants completed a typical IOED paradigm for devices, followed by rating their perceived completeness and accuracy for the explanations they generated. We also coded the explanations to determine their causal complexity. We found that lower ratings of overall perceived completeness and a sense of incomplete big explanatory components were predictive of a larger decrease in perceived understanding for that device post-explanation. Fewer causal links within an explanation also predicted a larger decrease in understanding ratings, suggesting that producing an explanation with a lower causal complexity led to a decrease in perceived understanding of that device. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to explanation characteristics that may cause a person’s illusion of understanding to break and proposed origins of the IOED phenomenon.