The Knowledge Illusion part 14

This post is on the book The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman (cognitive scientist and professor at Brown University) and Phillip Fernbach (cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at Colorado's Leeds School of business).

This post is the fourteenth in a series of sixteen that address The Knowledge Illusion and unless otherwise noted all quotes are from The Knowledge Illusion. I recommend reading all sixteen posts in order.

I have written on numerous other books on psychology, social psychology, critical thinking, cognitive dissonance theory and related topics already but discovered this one and feel it plays a complimentary and very needed role. It helps to explain a huge number of "hows" and "whys" regarding the other subjects I mentioned, all of the subjects.


In chapter eleven, Making People Smart, the authors discuss making people smart. The authors pointed out that in a comparison of poor kids in Brazil who were street merchants to survive the hyperinflation and extreme poverty the country experienced during the 1980s it was found the street merchants were better at addition and subtraction than children of the same age educated in the Brazilian school system.

They claim that people are designed primarily for action, not for listening to lectures and memorizing facts. They propose an element of action be included with learning even if reflection and classroom work is also required.

They comment on how students have difficulty understanding how little they study in reading, for example, when they have no element of application for what they read.

This is such a problem it has the name of illusion of comprehension, meaning people confuse understanding with familiarity or recognition. I run into this perhaps with people who have read a lot of statements regarding hypnosis, for example, by people who either misrepresent it to a degree, like Ronald Hubbard, or who don't believe it exists, so the other person believes they understand it when they really don't.

I also have found it regarding critical thinking, logical fallacies and numerous other subjects. A person can read about something, feel that they understand it but not be capable of explaining how it works in step by step cause and effect fashion and not be able to use the information when appropriate, but as they feel familiar with it they know that they understand it well.

This has been found to be true even if we run into information years later. In a test psychologist Paul Kolers found people who read text inverted (with all the letters upside down) were capable of doing it again a year later faster than text they hadn't read before. The mind retains some degree of memory or familiarity.

We can mistake familiarity with understanding. Both have accompanying emotions or sensations and we probably rarely analyze the cause and influence of our internal sensations.

The authors point out how many of us through repetition can recite the pledge of allegiance, but the understanding of it is not developed, so sometimes people have odd word substitutions they use.

 "Comprehension requires processing text with some care and effort, in a deliberate manner. It requires thinking about the author's intention. This apparently isn't obvious to everyone. Many students confuse studying with light reading.

So the conclusion we have come to in previous chapters - that people are more superficial than they realize, that we suffer from a knowledge illusion - extends to education as well: Learning requires breaking common habits by processing information more deeply.

                      Knowing What You Don't Know

We also suffer from the knowledge illusion because we confuse what experts know with what we ourselves know. The fact that I can access someone else's knowledge makes me feel like I already know what I'm talking about. The same phenomenon occurs in the classroom:  Children suffer from an illusion of comprehension because they can access the knowledge they need. It is in their textbook and in the heads of their teacher and the better students. Humans aren't built to become masters of all subjects; humans are built to participate in a community (another point suggested many years ago by the great John Dewey). " (Page 218)

The authors believe it is a mistake to see ourselves as going to school to become independent thinkers. Now, I personally place an extremely high value on independent and critical thinking.

They have observed that we tend to think of education as solely preparing one to operate completely independently, say as someone who can fix cars if you study to be a mechanic or to know a lot of facts about the past if you want to be a historian.

 "These ideas aren't wrong so much as incomplete. The idea education should increase intellectual independence is a very narrow view of learning. It ignores the fact that knowledge depends on others." (Page 219)

The examples of mechanic and historian need to know things beyond their immediate specialty. The mechanic needs to know where to get parts, how designs of cars change and many other things. The historian needs to know about other times, regions, people and countries so his knowledge will fit into a context. Either one needs to know something about economics as the mechanic likely wants to make a profit and the historian needs to know about how economic circumstances impact events.

The authors point out that when you have a skeletal understanding you need to know how to get more information and who to go to. Then you are using the community of knowledge.

"A real education includes learning that you don't know certain things (a lot of things). Instead of looking at in at the knowledge you do have, you learn to look out at the knowledge you don't have. To do this, you have to let go of some hubris; you have to accept that you don't know what you don't know. Learning what you don't know is just a matter of looking at the frontiers of your knowledge and wondering what is out there beyond that border. It's about asking why. Instead of learning to ask about events that occurred in Spain, it's learning to ask what you don't know, like why long division works.

As individuals we know little. There's not too much we can do about that; there's too much to know. Obviously we can learn some facts and theories, and we can develop skills. But we also have to learn how to make use of others' knowledge and skills. In fact, that's the key to success, because the vast majority of the knowledge and skills that we have access to reside in other people. In a community of knowledge, an individual is like a single piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Understanding where you fit requires understanding not only what you know but also what others know that you don't. Learning your place in a community of knowledge requires becoming aware of the knowledge outside yourself, what you don't know that touches on what you do know. " (Page 220 - 221)

The authors point out a course called Ignorance at Columbia University. Scientists are invited to come and speak about what they don't know, so the frontiers of their subjects are exposed and explored.

The authors consider one way that is good to expose what isn't known in a field is to do the actions of the people in the field. I have spoken with doctors and scientists and realized they often don't have access to information that a fictional depiction of their profession routinely shows. This is certainly true for police officers and attorneys. They have far less information than television shows and movies demonstrate and often get the information they do get at a much, much slower rate.

With science there has been said to be a tremendous problem with little exposure to scientific methods and a lot of emphasis on memorizing facts. I developed a very strong appreciation for scientific research in reading dozens of books on psychology and neuroscience and seeing explanations on how studies and experiments are constructed, carried out, observed then analyzed and how they can be repeated and varied to gain further understanding. They also can inspire other studies and experiments to debunk or strengthen any hypothesis that results from observing the results.

This includes learning about sample sizes, correlation not meaning causation and many other factors.

This is unlikely to occur unless you read a tremendous amount specifically on the design of experiments and about hundreds of experiments and studies or unless you get actual experience with the scientific method via application.

They explain that actual science involves a lot of division of cognitive labor. People focus on their specialties and leave the work of others to other people. The scientist relies on the community.

The authors explain how some conclusions come from direct observations, some come from inference, but most come from authority.

The authority is part of the community of knowledge and we rely on it. The authors consider it more important to know what is known and justified by others than to know the facts and justifications themselves. It is good to know what you personally concluded, how and why and what you are taking from an authority and why. You can even consider them both tentative and open to revisions or debunking.

The authors point out how scientists rely on the knowledge of the community and how all of us routinely operate things we don't understand including cars as modern cars are extremely complicated.

Much of what modern scientists operate on involves faith. It is faith that other scientists have done good research, used good methods and been honest and correct with their observations and conclusions. They point out this faith is different than religious faith. It has a feature at the core of science: observation. Science is the study of nature.

This study includes observation and has the feature of verification. Someone can check a scientific claim. Scientific claims get tested every day and often get debunked by observations of evidence that shows that they aren't true. The authors point out that if a scientific claim is false, eventually someone can test it and observe that it isn't true. It doesn't reflect reality.


 "Teaching science requires more than teaching scientific theory and facts. It also requires that students pay attention to the limits of their knowledge and learn how to fill in the gaps by working within a community. This entails learning about who to trust and where the real expertise is. When someone makes a scientific claim, should we believe that person? " (Page 226)

As much as I try to reject the appeal to authority (because authorities can be and have been wrong before), and the genetic fallacy (looking at the genesis or origin of a claim rather than a claim), and try to examine claims on their own merits whenever practical, we just don't have the ability, resources and time to personally fully verify or debunk every important claim. It pains me to admit it, but it is true.

I can't become a medical expert and a legal expert and a political expert and a hundred other experts whose advice and help I might need. I have a car and I don't plan to become a mechanic, I have a body and don't plan to become a doctor, I have a mind and don't plan to get a PhD in psychology or neuroscience or a dozen related fields. It's just not practical.

"There are many situations in which obtaining expert advice is the only sane thing to do: when you can't identify a weird flat discoloration on your skin; when the brakes on your car are smoking; when you're considering spending your life savings to purchase stock in an exciting new company (or a bridge in Brooklyn); or when you're thinking about mixing Diet Coke and hydrochloric acid to clean the rust off your cutlery.

How do you know when the advice you're getting is coming from an expert? If you understand the science behind the claim, then you're golden. You can evaluate the claim directly. But usually you don't have the necessary knowledge. Then you can ask if the claim is based on replicable evidence or if it's wisdom that comes from a friend of a friend. Was it published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, in the New York Times, or a supermarket tabloid? Learning about the nature of science - about the scientific process, about cases of scientific fraud, about the nature of peer review, and about scientific change and uncertainty - is critical to obtain the skills to evaluate scientific claims. " (Page 227)

I think a good understanding of how the scientific method has been developed and how good experiments are conducted is a foundation for being able to look at ideas and beliefs and see which are intuitive or untested assumptions and which are well supported based on observations of reality, observations designed to be accurate and reliable. It's different when you observe to find out what something really does as opposed to assuming it does what you expect and making a story to fit your beliefs rather than observations to test or debunk your beliefs.

If we understood many factors including sample sizes, isolating factors, and many other things that affect the actual research, we could ask the media to provide evidence and descriptions, not just conclusions.

"One goal of education should be to allow nonscientists to also be critical of what they see in the media. If enough of their audience was critical, news organizations might make a more concerted effort to get it right.

An important part of education consists of learning whether a claim is plausible, who would know, and whether this person is likely to tell the truth. There's no simple answer to making any of these judgements, but an educated person should be better at them than an uneducated one. This isn't just true in science; it's true of everything we teach, be it the law, history, geography, literature, philosophy or anything else. "(Page 228)

The authors embrace the idea of using this knowledge in having students learn as a group. Education researcher Ann Brown has a program called Fostering Communities of Learners. In this approach students in a grade school are presented a topic. They are divided into research groups that focus on a separate component of the issue. The students might examine an animal and have one group focus on its defense mechanisms, another on mating, another on food gathering. Then the students with minimal direction research the topics with experts, computers, written materials and learn as much as they can about their specialty.

They then gather and have one student from each team teach the other groups about their research. This encourages cooperation and fosters teamwork. No one knows it all, so everyone has recognizable value.

The authors encourage this communal learning far beyond grade school.

In real jobs teams that can work together and succeed at projects are what we desire, why not make it first nature ?

The authors encourage playing to people's strengths and giving everyone a foundation of a liberal education including critical thinking to help people and teaching skills like empathy and the ability to listen.

It's remarkable that many things they emphasize have been treated as personal characteristics rather than subjects in their own right. I can't tell you the number of people I have encountered who told me they "naturally" have good critical thinking skills, empathy and are good listeners.

Some people may be better without training than others, but a knack is no substitute for an education.