https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-do-not-think-alone/
People overestimate how well they understand how things work. Direct evidence for this comes from the psychological laboratory. The great Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students first demonstrated the illusion of explanatory depth, what we call the knowledge illusion. He asked people how well they understand how everyday objects (zippers, toilets, ballpoint pens) work. On average, people felt they had a reasonable understanding (at the middle of a 7-point scale). Then Keil asked them to explain how they work. People failed miserably. For the most part, people just can’t articulate the mechanisms that drive even the simplest things.
"Is the “Skeptical Thing” Over?"
In the video below, Scott Adams, who is a
trained hypnotist and writer on the psychology of persuasion (in addition to being the author of the comic strip Dilbert), says people are 90% irrational and 10% rational. We make decisions based on emotions not facts. He says you can't be a hypnotist if you don't understand that because otherwise nothing about hypnotism would make sense. He also brings up the argument that evolution selects for reproductive success not rationality.
I wanted to understand more about this so I looked into some references on persuasion to see how people are influenced by factors other than facts and logic. Adams has a list of recommended books on persuasion and I tried to find information online about what those authors wrote. What I found is that the vast majority of the techniques of persuasion identified by experts are based on psychological or rhetorical "tricks" that have nothing to do with facts and logic. I think that is what Adams means when he says people are not rational.
Part of the problem is that
groupthink creates an illusion of understanding. People think they believe things because they understand them, but they really believe them only because other people believe them.
https://www.economist.com/news/book...g-knowledge-between-minds-making-people-think
DO YOU know how a toilet works? What about a bicycle, or a zipper? Most people can provide half answers at best. They struggle to explain basic inventions, let alone more complex and abstract ones. Yet somehow, in spite of people’s ignorance, they created and navigate the modern world. A new book, “The Knowledge Illusion” sets out to tackle this apparent paradox: how can human thinking be so powerful, yet so shallow?
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The authors call this the illusion of understanding, and they demonstrate it with a simple experiment. Subjects are asked to rate their understanding of something, then to write a detailed account of it, and finally to rate their understanding again. The self-assessments almost invariably drop. The authors see this effect everywhere, from toilets and bicycles to complex policy issues.
