A Yale faculty member who studies the complicated cognitive reasons why people often think they know more than they do has received a $1.3 million multi-year merit award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The Method to Extend Research Award (MERIT) granted to Frank Keil, a professor of psychology and linguistics, is given to outstanding established scientists who are conducting significant research in areas of importance to the NIH.
Keil has published widely on folk science, which encompasses the intuitive, everyday set of explanatory beliefs that people have about the world. These beliefs are based on ways of understanding the world that begin in early childhood.
In a series of 12 experiments published last fall in the journal Cognitive Science, Keil and his graduate student, Leonid Rozenblit, asked undergraduate and graduate students to rate whether they had a deep, partial or shallow understanding of devices such as a helicopter, a flush toilet and a cylinder lock, or of natural processes such as tides and earthquakes.
Initially, the students rated their level of understanding quite high. When asked to explain in detail how an item worked, the participants decreased their reported level of understanding. They decreased it still further after answering critical diagnostic questions or being shown expert explanations.
"People, especially in the area of explanatory information -- which is how things work or why things are the way they are -- often badly miscalibrate their depth of understanding," Keil says. "It's as if they think they carry in their heads little annotated blueprints of how the world is structured. For other kinds of knowledge, such as that of narratives or procedures, they are well calibrated. Thus, they judge quite accurately their depth of knowledge of movie plots or how to make a particular recipe."
He says one reason people miscalibrate is they construct brief "gists" of the world, which is actually much more causally complex, and confuse their insights from these gists with a deeper mechanistic understanding. Keil and Rozenblit call this the "illusion of explanatory depth."
"The problem we all face is to encode the massive causal complexity in the world in much coarser but still effective ways," he explains. "The illusion does not mean people are completely ignorant. What it means is that people extract what they need to know to get by and confuse that success with having a much deeper knowledge."
People of all cultures, however, are very good at enriching their comprehension by dividing cognitive labor, he notes. In fact, Keil says, even very young children can group different types of understanding.
For example, children recognize that a person who knows why a basketball bounces better on a sidewalk than on the grass is more likely to understand why it takes so long for boats to stop than why ice cream costs more in the summer.
Keil says, "The children make the same contrast between physical mechanics and economics that adults do even though they obviously have never heard of those academic disciplines as such. Children as young as four sense enough of the causal structure of the world to allow them to know who knows what. But adults and children mistake their skill at using information outside their heads with having it internally represented in their own minds."
MERIT Awards provide long-term support to investigators with impressive records of scientific achievement in research areas of special importance or promise. Less than 5% of NIH investigators are selected to receive MERIT Awards.
The principal feature of the program is the opportunity for such investigators to gain up to 10 years of grant support. The MERIT Awards are intended to provide such investigators with long-term, stable support to foster their continued creativity and spare them some of the administrative burdens associated with frequent preparation and submission of research grant applications.
-- By Jacqueline Weaver
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