The Knowledge Illusion part 7

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 seventh 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 four, Why We Think What Isn't So, the authors take on inaccuracies in our thinking. They take on how we can incorrectly guess the paths that objects will take if for example they are attached to a rope that is spinning in a circle and the rope is cut.

Our causal reasoning is often good but not perfect. We have trouble with many tasks like adjusting brakes on a bike and setting clocks on ovens. I have struggled to get my seat back in position after getting the interior done at the car wash for years and resetting the sensor for when my oil change is due is always a challenge.

Andrea diSessa, a researcher at University of California, Berkley has found we often have faulty intuition. We make poor guesses about objects moving on round surfaces, possibly because we are used to objects moving on flat surfaces. We also make poor guesses about electricity, possibly because we of it flowing like water. We set a thermostat way above the temperature we want.

Most mechanistic phenomena are too small for us to directly observe so we use things that seem similar to guide our intuition. Much of this thought is usually not considered in fine detail so it goes along as uninspected assumptions and becomes habit.

We just are not naturally good enough at direct observation to easily overcome this limitation and so much of the time our kind of close approximation is good enough.

Our understanding of the physical world is mostly shallow and guided by  intuition. It's the same for the emotional world. We gather what information we can on a superficial level and make a lot of assumptions and follow our intuition.

The authors point out that deeper understanding is sometimes required, despite shallow understanding being habitual and passing for accurate understanding much of the time.

Two situations that require deeper understanding are given as examples. If a con man is trying to take advantage of someone then being able to figure out their true intentions is crucial.

Also, if a loved one is acting erratic or upset, then figuring out what to do may take a deeper understanding.

It is sad to say that very few people are good at spotting con men (though most of us assume we are) or dealing with upset people.

We have two ways we work out what causes things. One is quick and routine and largely unconscious and instinctive.

The other is much slower and more deliberate.

Daniel Kahneman described the differences in his excellent book Thinking,  Fast and Slow.

The two methods go by a variety of names and we can call them deliberative and intuitive.

If I ask for an animal whose name starts with "E" most of us just think "Elephant" quite easily.  That is intuitive.

If I ask you what word can the anagram "vaeertidebli" be made into it takes a lot of work for most of us to get the answer.

I will write it in a few lines from here so you can work it out if you like.

Aristotle wrote on how hard it is to overcome ingrained intuitions as the authors pointed out:

 "Now if arguments were in themselves enough to make men good, they would justly...have won very great rewards...But as things are..they are not able to encourage the many to nobility and goodness...What argument would remold such people? It is hard, if not impossible, to remove by argument the traits that have long since been incorporated into the character."
Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics, 1179. (Page 77)

The anagram can be reformed into "deliberative" .

Plato also gave a quote on this which appears in an abbreviated version:

"Let us, then, liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer. One of the horses is a lover of honor and guided by verbal commands alone; the other is companion to wild boasts and indecency, and barely yields to the goal." Plato , Phaedrus, 246 and 253 (Page 78)

What Plato calls "reason" is what Aristotle calls "argument" and we call "deliberative" , it's carefully, consciously thinking to solve problems and make the best decisions, especially when we take time to think things through.

The authors point out the important fact that intuitions are not, strictly speaking, passions. They are instinctive conclusions, not desires.

For example they point out that hearing a person say "about" a certain way can prompt us to think they are Canadian.

Although intuition can inspire desire. We can see a box that reminds us of cake and imagine a delicious cake. Seeing a desirable car can make us imagine driving it and seeing a desirable house can make us desire living in it.

So, passions are associated with intuitions. But not all intuitions are associated with desires.

Our causal reasoning can give us very different answers to problems depending on whether we look to intuition or deliberation. Intuitive answers come quicker and they are often not supported by good reason or facts but we have an amazing ability to make up explanations that seem logical to ourselves to support these answers.

Deliberation is harder and has a lot more "I don't know" and "I am not sure" involved.

People are not able to use intuition together. We can deliberate together and use reason to work things out. That is a crucial difference and influences us to be inspired to work together.

"Recall the illusion of explanatory depth, the finding that people think they understand causal systems better than they in fact do. The illusion is a product of the intuitive mind; we think about how things work automatically and effortlessly. But when we deliberate about our knowledge the illusion is shattered. This helps to explain why not everybody falls for the illusion." (Page 80)

Yale marketing professor Shane Frederick developed a three question test to see if someone is more intuitive or deliberate.

I am going to confess that I have seen this test and the answers about a half dozen times in reading various books on psychology, neuroscience, critical thinking and so on.

I know it is easy to get quick answers to these questions.

Here they are:

"A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?"

The quick answer most people guess (even people at Ivy League schools) is 10 cents. But if the ball costs ten cents then the bat would cost one dollar and ten cents by itself. So the two together would cost a dollar and twenty cents.

if you check carefully you can realize this and whether you use algebra or just keep guessing the only answer that works is five cents. The ball costs five cents and the bat at a dollar more costs a dollar and five cents so by adding the ball cost of five cents and the bat cost of a dollar and five cents we get the dollar and ten cents they combine to make.

"In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? "

Most people guess "24" as the answer. In fairness I have run into variations on the "doubling" question and was prepared because my wife explained it to me on one of them. If it doubles in size every day and on the 48th day fully covers the lake, then one day earlier, the 47th day, it half covered the lake.

Last question:

"If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?" ( Page 82)

The quick response of 100 minutes is wrong. Each machine makes one widget per 5 minutes as 5 machines make 5 widgets in 5 minutes. So, a  hundred machines likewise need 5 minutes to make 100 widgets.

I have to admit that until I ran into these kinds of problems over and over I got a lot wrong. Books on critical thinking sometimes have them to show that you can develop the self checking habit and improve your accuracy but it takes a lot of work and practice.

The most important part is checking your answers and seeing where the quick guess is wrong. Most people don't.

Less than 20 percent of Americans get the whole test right. People at Massachusetts institute of Technology had 48 percent get all three right and Princeton had 26 percent.

The people who get all three answers right are more deliberative than most of us. They think things through and don't just grab the first idea they think of. If they do get that intuitive answer they check to verify it.

By looking at them interesting tendencies have been found. Deliberative people tend to be better at spotting a collection of words that are meant to sound impressive but hold no meaning. They are less impulsive than others and they can wait or take a chance to get a bigger reward. They are also less likely to believe in God.

But regarding our focus, more deliberative people have less of an illusion of explanatory depth. In research they were not unaware of the lack of understanding they had with unfamiliar or little known things. They knew they didn't understand things without having to have it revealed.

"Intuition gives us a simplified, coarse, and usually good enough analysis, and this gives us the illusion that we know a fair amount. But when we deliberate, we come to appreciate how complex things actually are, and this reveals to us how little we actually know." (Page 83)

One possible explanation on the difference between the people who did better on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and most of us is that they are crave more detail. In research it was found that they tend to like products with detailed advertisement more than most people.

There are people who love to get answers for things and to explain things in fine detail. In other research people have talked about people who like "large cognitive loads" and read books about things in depth like books on psychology, how the brain works, critical thinking or, well, anything in depth.

Different people prefer different cognitive loads. Some people are not interested in the reasons why things are certain ways. Others want to know and think through them in great depth.

You might accuse someone of over-thinking or going down a rabbit hole when they are just doing what comes naturally for them. It is important to understand that what may seem unpleasant or even non-productive to one person is enjoyable to another.

I know people who have not read a single book since high school and hate reading and others who feel something is wrong if they can't read a book  a week, or write an article or two per week. Some are content to use Facebook every day and read a few short articles a day but would hate to read books, no  matter how useful the books could be.

The authors note that the illusion of explanatory depth is intuitive, we reflexively FEEL like we understand things when they are brought up. But when deliberation about the details and in depth explanation is required we can see the illusion shatter.

I have several times exposed the illusion myself. In dealing with ex Scientologists on several occasions they have proclaimed knowing a lot about both Scientology and the subject of hypnosis. I have followed in the tradition of Jon Atack and many, many other Scientology critics and extensively documented evidence that Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard plagiarized a  vast amount of the techniques and methods in Dianetics and Scientology from hypnosis.

Very often Scientologists and ex Scientologists tell me that is absurd and impossible. I  usually just ask them about their opinion on the methods of hypnotic induction. And what they think about the  techniques of  mimicry, paradox aka confusion, repetition, vivid imagery and attention fixation. And what they believe a stage hypnotist does to pick out which of the available volunteers to bring on stage.

They usually concede that actually don't know much about hypnosis. If you don't know these things, then unless you studied a very unusual school or style of hypnosis you don't know much about it.

It's fine to not know about something. It can be a disaster to think that you know all about something you actually don't know anything about.