My guess is that you feel that you know how a bicycle works. You’ve seen them all your life. You may have seen one this morning. If I asked you to rate, on a scale of one to ten, how well you understand a bicycle, you would probably say eight or nine. Basically, you would feel that you understand how bicycles look and how they work.

But, what if I asked you to take a piece of paper, and draw a bicycle? My guess is that if you started drawing a bike, the wheels, the pedals, the chain, the frame, you would realize that your confidence in your knowledge is somewhat misplaced.

In 2006, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool named Rebecca Lawson ran a version of this experiment. She gave participants a partial drawing of a bicycle that had the wheels and the handlebars, and she asked them to fill in the frame, the pedals, and the chain. Beforehand, the participants rated how well they understood how a bicycle works. They rated themselves high. After they drew the bicycle, almost none of them could draw a working one. Pedals attached to the front wheel. Chain that ran through the front fork. Frames with bars in the wrong places. Some of the bicycles were so wrong that they could not have been ridden. After the drawing exercise, when participants were asked to rate their understanding again, the average rating dropped by nearly half.

The low knowledge but high confidence when it comes to bicycles is not an unusual case. Lawson’s study was inspired by an earlier, broader piece of research by Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil at Yale, called “The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science.” Rozenblit and Keil asked participants to rate their understanding of a long list of common objects and processes: how a flush toilet works, how a helicopter takes off, how a sewing machine sews, how a zipper closes, how a presidential election decides anything. People rated themselves confidently on most items. Then the researchers asked them to write a step-by-step explanation of how each item worked. The explanations were thin. After writing them, participants dropped their confidence ratings sharply, and the drop persisted even after they read accurate explanations from experts.

Rozenblit and Keil called the gap between what we feel we understand and what we understand “The Illusion of Explanatory Depth.” And it is an illusion that we carry it with us almost everywhere we go. The reason we carry this illusion is straightforward. We see a bicycle work. We see a flush toilet work. We see a zipper work. We see a medication reducing fever. The thing we observe is the surface. The mechanism is hidden. Our brain mistakes the smoothness of the surface for an understanding of the mechanism, because the smoothness is what we directly experience. Pull the covers off, and we realize that the mechanism is very different than what we imagined it to be.

The good news is that the illusion of explanatory depth is one of the most repaired-by-experience cognitive biases I know of. The repair is simple. Try to explain. Try to draw. Try to teach. The moment we try to clearly express our understanding, our true understanding becomes calibrated to some degree, and closer to our actual level of knowledge.

This last part is what I find most hopeful in this research. if the illusion can be punctured by a single attempt to truly explain what we understand, there is hope. So, here is an exercise I prepared for you. Follow this link and explore one thing that is both important and that you believe in very strongly. Something that you believe and other people don’t. The link below would help you do the kind of bicycle exercise for your belief.

I truly encourage you to try it.

https://decisionaids.danariely.com/belief-audit/

Draw a Bicycle

(The Short version: Adapted from Misbelief)

My guess is that you feel that you know how a bicycle works. You’ve seen them all your life. You may have seen one this morning. If I asked you to rate, on a scale of one to ten, how well you understand a bicycle, you would probably say eight or nine. Basically, you would feel that you understand how bicycles look and how they work.

But, do you?

There is a research stream called “The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science.” In this kind of research participants are asked to rate their understanding of a long list of common objects and processes: how a flush toilet works, how a helicopter takes off, how a sewing machine sews, how a zipper closes, how a presidential election decides anything. People rated themselves confidently on most items. Then the researchers ask them to write a step-by-step explanation of how each item worked. The explanations come out thin. And the good news? After trying to explain what they thought they understood, participants dropped their confidence ratings sharply, and the drop persisted even after they read accurate explanations from experts.

This is truly fantastic news because it tells us that the illusion of explanatory depth is one of the most repaired-by-experience cognitive biases I know of. The repair is simple. Try to explain. Try to draw. Try to teach. The moment we try to clearly express our understanding, our true understanding becomes calibrated to some degree, and closer to our actual level of knowledge.

This last part is what I find most hopeful in this research. if the illusion can be punctured by a single attempt to truly explain what we understand, there is hope. So, here is an exercise I prepared for you. Follow this link and explore one thing that is both important and that you believe in very strongly. Something that you believe and other people don’t. The link below would help you do the kind of bicycle exercise for your belief.

I truly encourage you to try it.

https://decisionaids.danariely.com/belief-audit/