How do you change someone’s mind if you think you are right and they are wrong? Psychology reveals the last thing to do is the tactic we usually resort to.
A little over a decade ago Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they understand how something works when in fact their understanding is superficial at best.
What happens, argued the researchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for the belief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work.
Why would we bother expending the effort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so? The interesting thing is that we manage to hide from ourselves exactly how shallow our understanding is.
All over the world, teachers say to each other “I didn’t really understand this until I had to teach it”.
Research published last year on this illusion of understanding shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong.
The research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of the University of Colorado, reasoned that the phenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work.
Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues.
Source: The best way to win an argument
Originally published at Cogly.
