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The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone - Hardcover

Sloman, Steven; Fernbach, Philip

 
9780399184352: The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 039918435X ISBN 13: 9780399184352
Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker

We all think we know more than we actually do.
 
Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
 
The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven Sloman is a professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University. He is the editor in chief of the journal Cognition. He lives with his wife in Providence, Rhode Island. His two children have flown the coop.

Philip Fernbach is a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and two children.

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One

What We Know

Nuclear warfare lends itself to illusion. Alvin Graves was the scientific director of the U.S. military’s bomb testing program in the early fifties. He was the person who gave the order to go ahead with the disastrous Castle Bravo detonation discussed in the last chapter. No one in the world should have understood the dangers of radioactivity better than Graves. Eight years before Castle Bravo, in 1946, Graves was one of eight men in a room in Los Alamos, the nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, while another researcher, Louis Slotin, performed a tricky maneuver the great physicist Richard Feynman nicknamed “tickling the dragon’s tail.” Slotin was experimenting with plutonium, one of the radioactive ingredients used in nuclear bombs, to see how it behaved. The experiment involved closing the gap between two hemispheres of beryllium surrounding a core of plutonium. As the hemispheres got closer together, neutrons released from the plutonium reflected back off the beryllium, causing more neutrons to be released. The experiment was dangerous. If the hemispheres got too close, a chain reaction could release a burst of radiation. Remarkably, Slotin, an experienced and talented physicist, was using a flathead screwdriver to keep the hemispheres separated. When the screwdriver slipped and the hemispheres crashed together, the eight physicists in the room were bombarded with ­dangerous doses of radiation. Slotin took the worst of it and died in the infirmary nine days later. The rest of the team eventually recovered from the initial radiation sickness, though several died young of cancers and other diseases that may have been related to the accident.

How could such smart people be so dumb?

It’s true that accidents happen all the time. We’re all guilty of slicing our fingers with a knife or closing the car door on someone’s hand by mistake. But you’d hope a group of eminent physicists would know to depend on more than a handheld flathead screwdriver to separate themselves from fatal radiation poisoning. According to one of Slotin’s colleagues, there were much safer ways to do the plutonium experiment, and Slotin knew it. For instance, he could have fixed one hemisphere in position and raised the other from below. Then, if anything slipped out of position, gravity would separate the hemispheres harmlessly.

Why was Slotin so reckless? We suspect it’s because he experienced the same illusion that we have all experienced: that we understand how things work even when we don’t. The physicists’ surprise was like the surprise you feel when you try to fix a leaky faucet and end up flooding the bathroom, or when you try to help your daughter with her math homework and end up stumped by quadratic equations. Too often, our confidence that we know what’s going on is greater at the beginning of an episode than it is at the end.

Are such cases just random examples, or is there something more systematic going on? Do people have a habit of overestimating their understanding of how things work? Is knowledge more superficial than it seems? These are the questions that obsessed Frank Keil, a cognitive scientist who worked at Cornell for many years and moved to Yale in 1998. At Cornell, Keil had been busy studying the ­theories people have about how things work. He soon came to realize how shallow and incomplete those theories are, but he ran into a ­roadblock. He could not find a good method to demonstrate scientifically how much people know relative to how much they think they know. The methods he tried took too long or were too hard to score or led participants to just make stuff up. And then he had an epiphany, coming up with a method to show what he called the illusion of explanatory depth (IoED, for short) that did not suffer from these problems: “I distinctly remember one morning standing in the shower in our home in Guilford, Connecticut, and almost the entire IoED paradigm spilled out in that one long shower. I rushed into work and grabbed Leon Rozenblit, who had been working with me on the division of cognitive labor, and we started to map out all the details.”

Thus a method for studying ignorance was born, a method that involved simply asking people to generate an explanation and showing how that explanation affected their rating of their own understanding. If you were one of the many people that Rozenblit and Keil subsequently tested, you would be asked a series of questions like the following:

1.On a scale from 1 to 7, how well do you understand how zippers work?

2.How does a zipper work? Describe in as much detail as you can all the steps involved in a zipper’s operation.

If you’re like most of Rozenblit and Keil’s participants, you don’t work in a zipper factory and you have little to say in answer to the second question. You just don’t really know how zippers work. So, when asked this question:

3.Now, on the same 1 to 7 scale, rate your knowledge of how a zipper works again.

This time, you show a little more humility by lowering your rating. After trying to explain how a zipper works, most people realize they have little idea and thus lower their knowledge rating by a point or two.

This sort of demonstration shows that people live in an illusion. By their own admission, respondents thought they understood how zippers work better than they did. When people rated their knowledge the second time as lower, they were essentially saying, “I know less than I thought.” It’s remarkable how easy it is to disabuse people of their illusion; you merely have to ask them for an explanation. And this is true of more than zippers. Rozenblit and Keil obtained the same result with speedometers, piano keys, flush toilets, cylinder locks, helicopters, quartz watches, and sewing machines. And everyone they tested showed the illusion: graduate students at Yale as well as undergraduates at both an elite university and a regional public one. We have found the illusion countless times with undergraduates at a different Ivy League university, at a large public school, and testing random samples of Americans over the Internet. We have also found that people experience the illusion not only with everyday objects but with just about everything: People overestimate their understanding of political issues like tax policy and foreign relations, of hot-button scientific topics like GMOs and climate change, and even of their own finances. We have been studying psychological phenomena for a long time and it is rare to come across one as robust as the illusion of understanding.

One interpretation of what occurs in these experiments is that the effort people make to explain something changes how they interpret what “knowledge” means. Maybe when asked to rate their knowledge, they are answering a different question the first time they are asked than they are the second time. They may interpret the first question as “How effective am I at thinking about zippers?” After attempting to explain how the object works, they instead assess how much knowledge they are actually able to articulate. If so, their second answer might have been to a question that they understood more as “How much knowledge about zippers am I able to put into words?” This seems unlikely, because Rozenblit and Keil used such careful and explicit instructions when they asked the knowledge questions. They told participants precisely what they meant by each scale value (1 to 7). But even if respondents were answering different questions before and after they tried to explain how the object worked, it remains true that their attempts to generate an explanation taught them about themselves: They realized that they have less knowledge that...

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Verlag
Riverhead Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
039918435X
ISBN 13 
9780399184352
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
RIVERHEAD
https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/

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