People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1–6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7–10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12, and discuss the implications of our findings for the roles of intuitive theories in concepts and cognition.

Four experiments examined 3 types of violations of coherence criteria in risk assessments of a terrorist attack. First, the requirement that extensionally equivalent descriptions be assigned the same probability (i.e., additivity) was violated. Unpacking descriptions of an attack into subtypes led to an increase in assessed risk. Second, additivity was also violated when risk assessments were obtained by subtracting the probability of no attack from 1.0. This refocusing procedure inflated assessed risk. Third, refocusing also increased the proportion of monotonicity violations in assessing risk across increasing or decreasing timeframes. Task structuring that promoted consideration of complementary possibilities increased coherence, suggesting that incoherence is due primarily to errors in applying rather than comprehending the relevant criteria.

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neuropsychologia Are all judgments created equal? An fMRI study of semantic and episodic metamemory predictions