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Students claimed knowledge of invented concepts
A recent paper tested what a single class does to a student's sense of what they know. Students who had finished a psychology and law class were asked about a set of psycho-legal concepts, and they answered yes, they knew them.
The questions also covered other concepts that were never mentioned in class. Students claimed to know those too. The researchers had invented every one of them, so there was nothing to know.
Each of us lives in a bubble of our own experience, and the line between what a person knows and what they don't is fuzzy inside it. Taking classes on a topic like psychology and law is enough to make people start thinking they know things they can't possibly know.
Why does hearing a term make it feel known?
Familiarity is easy for the mind to mistake for knowledge. In a 1989 experiment, psychologist Larry Jacoby and colleagues had people read a list of made-up names, then later rate whether other names were famous. Names seen earlier were more often judged famous, even though they belonged to nobody. The effect became known as the false fame effect.
How do surveys catch people claiming fake knowledge?
Researchers mix invented items in among real ones and ask people to rate their familiarity with each. Psychologist Delroy Paulhus and colleagues described this over-claiming technique in a 2003 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Because a made-up item cannot be known, any claim of knowing it counts as over-claiming. Paulhus found that people who claimed more fake items also tended to score higher on measures of self-enhancement.
Why do people overrate how well they understand things?
In a 2002 study in Cognitive Science, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil asked people to rate how well they understood everyday devices such as zippers and flush toilets. People then wrote step-by-step explanations of how those devices work, and their ratings of their own understanding dropped afterward. The researchers called the gap the illusion of explanatory depth.
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