Illusion of Explanatory Depth

Principal Category: Cognitive Bias

Authors:
• Tim McGuinness, Ph.D., DFin, MCPO, MAnth – Anthropologist, Scientist, Polymath, Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.

 

Abstract

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth is a cognitive bias in which people overestimate their understanding of complex systems, mistaking familiarity and language for true comprehension. This bias affects decision-making, political beliefs, susceptibility to misinformation, and vulnerability to fraud. In scams, it creates a false sense of security before victimization, reinforces perceived control during manipulation, and fuels self-blame after discovery. The bias also interferes with recovery when individuals oversimplify trauma healing or believe they should already understand what happened. Recognizing the Illusion of Explanatory Depth helps clarify why intelligent individuals can be deceived and why recovery is often non-linear. Addressing this bias supports healthier self-assessment, reduces shame, and encourages appropriate reliance on education, support, and professional expertise during recovery.

Illusion of Explanatory Depth – Cognitive Bias

The ‘Illusion of Explanatory Depth’ (often abbreviated as IOED) is a cognitive bias that describes the human tendency to overestimate our own understanding of how complex systems, objects, or phenomena work. In simpler terms, it is the feeling that you comprehend something in great detail, when in reality, your knowledge is quite shallow. This illusion is revealed the moment you are asked to actually explain the mechanism in a step-by-step manner.

The concept was popularized by cognitive psychologists Steven Sloman and Fernand Gobet, and further demonstrated in a landmark study by Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in 2002. Their research showed that people consistently believe they understand how things like a toilet’s flush mechanism, a bicycle’s gears, or even a government policy work, until they are forced to generate a causal explanation for it. At that point, the illusion shatters, and they recognize the vast gaps in their knowledge.

How the Illusion Works

The IOED arises from a combination of mental shortcuts and environmental cues:

1. Confusing Familiarity with Understanding: We interact with countless systems every day. You use a smartphone, drive a car, and flush a toilet. This constant familiarity breeds an intuitive sense of knowing. Your brain mistakes this procedural familiarity (“I know how to use it”) for conceptual understanding (“I know how it works”).
2. Relying on Knowledge of Others: We live in a world with a vast division of cognitive labor. You don’t need to know how to build a car engine because you know a mechanic does. You don’t need to understand semiconductor physics because you trust that engineers at Apple do. This reliance on the expertise in our social network or society at large creates a “knowledge illusion,” where we feel the collective knowledge is part of our own personal understanding.
3. The Power of Language: We can use words and labels for things, like “transmission,” “cloud computing,” or “fiscal policy”, which gives us a false sense of comprehension. We can talk about these things at a high level, which tricks our brain into thinking we grasp the underlying mechanics.

The Classic Toilet Example

The most common illustration of the IOED is the toilet. Most people feel confident they understand how a toilet works. They have a vague mental image involving a tank, water, a handle, and a siphon. However, when asked to draw it or explain it in detail, they falter. Where exactly does the water go when you push the handle? What is the specific mechanism that stops the tank from refilling endlessly? What role does the float play? Most people cannot articulate the precise chain of cause-and-effect, revealing that their “understanding” was just a collection of labels and a fuzzy concept, not a robust mental model.

Why the Illusion of Explanatory Depth Matters

The IOED is not just a quirky mental flaw; it has profound consequences in our daily lives and society at large:

• Political Polarization: It contributes heavily to political polarization. People feel passionately about complex policies like healthcare reform, international trade agreements, or tax codes. They have strong opinions because their IOED makes them believe they understand the nuances and consequences. However, their understanding is often based on simplistic slogans and tribal loyalty, not a deep grasp of the policy’s mechanics, making them resistant to compromise or new information.
• Support for Pseudoscience: The IOED allows pseudoscientific ideas to thrive. People feel they “understand” how a homeopathic remedy or a detox tea works because they can repeat the scientific-sounding jargon used to market it. They confuse this surface-level familiarity with genuine biological knowledge, making them vulnerable to misinformation and fraud.
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect Connection: The IOED is closely related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. The IOED is a specific form of this, where the “task” is explanation. The illusion creates a peak of “mount stupid” confidence that only collapses when the person is forced to attempt the task of explaining the concept.
• Innovation and Problem-Solving: In professional settings, the IOED can stifle innovation. A team might feel they fully understand a problem and jump to a flawed solution because no one takes the time to shatter the illusion by forcing a deep, causal explanation of the problem itself.

Overcoming the Illusion of Explanatory Depth requires intellectual humility and a conscious effort to move beyond familiarity. It involves actively asking yourself, “Could I explain this to a 10-year-old?” or “Could I draw a diagram of how this works?” By embracing the discomfort of realizing what we don’t know, we open the door to genuine learning and more critical thinking.

How it Relates to Scams

The ‘Illusion of Explanatory Depth’ (IOED) is a powerful cognitive bias that can significantly increase a person’s vulnerability to scams at every stage of the victimization cycle, from the initial approach to the difficult journey of recovery. It creates a false sense of understanding and control that scammers can expertly exploit, and it can later become a major obstacle to healing.

Before the Scam: The False Sense of Security

Before the scam even begins, the IOED creates a baseline of vulnerability by fostering an inflated sense of confidence in one’s ability to detect deception. Most people believe they understand the general concept of a scam: a bad person asks for money for a fake reason. This simple, familiar model feels like a complete explanation.

This illusion leads them to think, “I’m too smart for that. I would never fall for something so obvious.” They mistake their general familiarity with the idea of a scam for a deep understanding of the mechanisms of modern, psychologically manipulative scams. They don’t understand the specific tactics like love bombing, social engineering, cognitive overload, or the creation of a fabricated reality. Because their mental model of a scam is a cartoon villain asking for their bank password, they are completely unprepared for the sophisticated, emotionally resonant, and long-con approach of a professional scammer. The IOED gives them a dangerous and unwarranted sense of security, lowering their guard.

During the Scam: The Illusion of Control and Understanding

Once the scam is underway, the IOED continues to play a critical role in keeping the victim engaged. The scammer presents a complex but seemingly coherent narrative, a fake investment platform, an international business deal, a desperate medical emergency. The victim, wanting to be a helpful and intelligent participant, quickly builds a shallow mental model of this situation.

They learn the jargon (“cryptocurrency wallet,” “shipping container,” “customs fees”), see the fabricated documents, and feel they “understand” what is happening. They believe they are a partner in a legitimate venture, not a mark in a deception. This illusion of explanatory depth gives them a powerful sense of agency and control. They feel they are making informed decisions based on the “facts” presented by the scammer. When a red flag appears, their IOED helps them dismiss it. Instead of seeing it as a fundamental flaw in the narrative, they see it as a minor anomaly they can “fix” within their flawed understanding. For example, “The bank transfer is delayed? That makes sense, it’s an international wire, I understand how that works.” They are using their illusion of understanding to patch the holes in the scammer’s story, actively participating in their own deception.

After the Scam: The Barrier to Recovery and Self-Blame

After the scam is revealed, the IOED undergoes a sinister transformation and becomes one of the biggest barriers to recovery. The illusion of understanding that once made them feel in control now shatters, but it is replaced by a new, equally dangerous illusion: the illusion that they should have understood.

The victim looks back and thinks, “It all seems so obvious now.” They mistakenly believe that the clarity of hindsight was available to them in foresight. They create a new, simple mental model of the event: “A scammer asked for money, and I gave it to them. That’s all it was.” This oversimplification, another form of the IOED, ignores the months of psychological manipulation, the emotional grooming, and the sophisticated reality-creation that occurred.

This leads directly to intense self-blame and shame. They believe they failed at a simple test of intelligence, not that they were outmatched by a professional manipulator using advanced psychological tactics. They think, “I’m a smart person, I should have seen this,” failing to grasp that their intelligence was the very thing being exploited. This makes it incredibly difficult to seek help, as admitting they were scammed feels like admitting they are foolish, which clashes with their identity. The IOED prevents them from accurately explaining how they were victimized, so they cannot process the trauma correctly. They remain stuck in a loop of “I should have known,” which is a direct product of the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. To heal, they must shatter this new illusion and accept that they did not, and could not, fully understand the complex psychological game being played on them at the time.

The Impact on Those Who Think They Understand Recovery

The ‘Illusion of Explanatory Depth’ (IOED) can have a particularly insidious effect on scam victims during their recovery, especially when it leads them to believe they can heal entirely on their own and prematurely transition into the role of an advocate or guide for others. While their desire to help is commendable, this cognitive bias can cause them to oversimplify the complex process of trauma recovery, inadvertently hindering their own healing and potentially misguiding those they try to help.

The Illusion of Understanding Recovery

After the initial shock of a scam subsides, a victim’s mind, in its quest for control and order, will create a simplified mental model of the recovery process. This model is often built on a foundation of platitudes, common-sense advice, and a desire for a linear path forward. It looks something like this:

1. Acknowledge that the scam happened.
2. Accept it wasn’t my fault.
3. Block the scammer and stop thinking about it.
4. “Get over it” and move on.

This sequence feels logical and comprehensive. The victim, armed with this model, develops an illusion of explanatory depth. They believe they “understand” recovery. They think, “I just need to be strong, stay busy, and not dwell on the past.” This illusion is reinforced by the “toxic positivity” often found on social media, which suggests that resilience is simply a matter of willpower. The victim mistakes this superficial familiarity with the idea of recovery for a deep understanding of the intricate psychological work required to heal from trauma. They fail to grasp the non-linear nature of healing, the potential for complex PTSD, the neuroscience of trauma bonding, and the deep rewiring of the brain’s trust mechanisms that must occur.

The Pitfall of “I Can Recover On My Own”

This illusion of understanding directly fuels the belief that they can and should recover alone. If recovery is just a simple checklist, then asking for help seems like an admission of weakness or failure. The thought process becomes: “I understand the steps, so I just need to execute them. I don’t need a therapist or a support group; I’m smart enough to handle this.”

This is a dangerous trap. True recovery is not an intellectual exercise; it is an emotional and neurological one. It requires processing grief, anger, and shame in a safe environment, learning to regulate a dysregulated nervous system, and gradually rebuilding trust with the guidance of someone who can provide an objective perspective. By believing their shallow model is sufficient, the victim isolates themselves. They may suppress their emotions rather than process them, leading to a “freeze” response where the trauma remains unprocessed and continues to affect their behavior and relationships. They are essentially trying to perform surgery on themselves with a first-aid kit, convinced they understand the procedure because they’ve watched a medical drama.

The Dangers of Premature Advocacy

The most problematic stage is when the victim, feeling they have “recovered” because they’ve followed their own simplified model, decides to become an advocate or guide for other victims. This is where the IOED can cause the most harm. They now position themselves as experts, sharing their flawed understanding with newly victimized individuals who are desperate for guidance.

Their advice, while well-intentioned, is often based on their illusion:

• “You just need to be stronger than they were.”
• “Stop blaming yourself and just move on.”
• “Don’t talk about it too much; it will only make it worse.”

This advice is not only unhelpful but can be actively damaging. It can shame a new victim for feeling weak or for struggling with their emotions, reinforcing the very self-blame they need to overcome. The “advocate” is essentially projecting their own illusion of understanding onto someone who is in a fragile state, potentially leading them down the same path of isolation and shallow healing. They are teaching others to use the same faulty first-aid kit on their own deep wounds.

Breaking the Cycle for True Healing

To overcome this, a victim must first recognize the illusion. They need to ask themselves: “Can I truly explain the neurological process of trauma bonding? Can I articulate the difference between suppression and processing? Do I understand the therapeutic techniques used to treat PTSD?” The answer, for most, will be no. This recognition is the first step toward true intellectual humility.

Real recovery and effective advocacy come from embracing the complexity, not denying it. It means accepting that healing is messy, non-linear, and often requires professional guidance. A true advocate is not someone who claims to have all the answers but someone who can say, “I don’t have all the answers, but I can walk with you and point you toward the resources that helped me.” They share their experience but defer to experts on the mechanics of recovery. By letting go of the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, a victim can move from a place of false confidence to a place of genuine wisdom, allowing them to heal properly and, eventually, become the truly helpful and compassionate guide they want to be.

How to Overcome It

Overcoming the ‘Illusion of Explanatory Depth’ (IOED) is not about eliminating the bias itself, our brains will always take shortcuts, but about developing the awareness and habits to recognize and counteract it. It requires a conscious shift from passive familiarity to active understanding. Here are several practical strategies someone can use to overcome this cognitive bias.

Embrace the “Try It Yourself” Test

The most direct way to shatter an illusion of understanding is to force yourself to generate an explanation from scratch. This is the core principle discovered by Rozenblit and Keil. Instead of just thinking you understand something, actively test your knowledge.

• Explain it Out Loud: Pick a concept you think you understand, like how your Wi-Fi works, why we have seasons, or the mechanics of a 401(k), and explain it out loud to an imaginary person or a patient friend. As you verbalize it, you will immediately stumble upon the gaps in your knowledge. The moment you have to say “well, it’s just sort of a… thing that…” is the moment the illusion breaks.
• Draw It: Grab a pen and paper and try to draw a diagram of the system. This is incredibly effective for physical or process-based concepts. As mentioned before, trying to draw the inner workings of a toilet, a bicycle’s gear system, or the flow of data in a social media algorithm will reveal how little you actually know about the connections between the parts. The act of translating thought into a visual model forces precision.

Practice Intellectual Humility

A key part of overcoming IOED is accepting that it’s okay not to know things. This requires cultivating intellectual humility, which is the recognition that your knowledge is limited and fallible.

• Ask “What Don’t I Know?”: Make it a habit to actively question your own understanding. Instead of focusing on what you know, shift your focus to what you don’t know. When listening to a news report about a complex issue, ask yourself: “What assumptions are being made here? What jargon am I not fully grasping? What part of this story is missing?” This mindset turns you from a passive consumer of information into a critical examiner.
• Separate Familiarity from Fluency: Consciously distinguish between recognizing a term and being able to explain it. You might be familiar with blockchain, but can you explain the concept of a distributed ledger in your own words? Acknowledging the difference between “I’ve heard of that” and “I understand that” is a crucial step.

Value the Process Over the Outcome

We often focus on the what (the outcome) rather than the how (the process). To overcome IOED, you must become fascinated with the process.

• Become a “How” Person: When you encounter a claim or a technology, train your brain to ask “how?” instead of just “what?”. If someone says, “This new policy will boost the economy,” don’t just accept the outcome. Ask, “How, specifically, is it expected to do that? What are the causal mechanisms? Which groups are affected and how?” This forces you to move beyond surface-level conclusions and dig into the mechanics.
• Unpack the Black Box: Treat complex systems as “black boxes” and make it your mission to unpack them. Your smartphone is a black box. Start by learning one small thing about how it works. How does GPS determine your location? How does a touchscreen register your touch? You don’t need to become an engineer, but by chipping away at the mystery, you replace illusion with genuine knowledge.

Leverage the Division of Cognitive Labor Correctly

The IOED thrives because we rely on others’ expertise. The key is to do this consciously and critically, not passively.

• Identify the Experts: Instead of absorbing the “knowledge” from your social feed, actively identify who the credible experts are on a given topic. A scientist’s understanding of climate change is not the same as a politician’s. Learn to distinguish between informed opinion and uninformed assertion.
• Trust, but Verify (When it Matters): You don’t need to verify everything, but for important decisions (like voting, investing, or medical choices), you should seek out explanations from multiple, reliable sources. If your financial advisor explains a product, you should be able to ask “how” questions and get clear, non-jargony answers. If they can’t, that’s a red flag, not a sign that you’re not smart enough to understand.

Teach Others

The ultimate test of understanding is the ability to teach a concept to someone else effectively. This is known as the Feynman Technique.

• Find a Novice: Try to explain a concept to a child or someone with no background in the subject. This forces you to abandon jargon and use simple analogies. If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. This process will instantly reveal the weak points in your own mental model and show you exactly where you need to learn more.

By consistently applying these strategies, you can train your brain to be more skeptical of its own feeling of knowing. Overcoming the Illusion of Explanatory Depth is a lifelong practice of replacing false confidence with genuine curiosity and intellectual humility. It’s the difference between feeling smart and actually becoming smarter.

Conclusion

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth plays a quiet but powerful role in how people assess risk, interpret information, and judge both themselves and others. It creates confidence without comprehension, which is usually harmless in everyday life but becomes dangerous when applied to complex systems like politics, medicine, technology, and psychological manipulation. In the context of scams, this bias does not reflect a lack of intelligence. It reflects a universal human tendency to mistake familiarity, language, and surface coherence for real understanding.

For scam victims, recognizing this bias is not about assigning blame. It is about restoring accuracy. The illusion explains why intelligent, capable people can be drawn into sophisticated deceptions and why hindsight so often produces crushing self-judgment. It also explains why recovery can stall when survivors believe they should already understand what happened or believe that healing is simple if they are disciplined enough.

Breaking the Illusion of Explanatory Depth requires humility, not self-criticism. It requires acknowledging that modern scams, psychological trauma, and recovery processes are far more complex than they appear from the outside. When that complexity is respected, victims can replace shame with understanding and false confidence with informed support.

The same principle applies to recovery advocacy. Genuine help grows from curiosity, education, and respect for expertise, not from simplified narratives or premature certainty. When survivors learn to question what they think they understand, they regain agency without self-blame and clarity without arrogance. That shift does not weaken recovery. It strengthens it by grounding healing in realism, patience, and truth.

Glossary

• Advocacy Prematurity — The tendency for a survivor to assume a helper or educator role before completing personal recovery, often driven by overconfidence rather than integration. This can unintentionally spread oversimplified guidance and reinforce unprocessed trauma.
• Agency Illusion — The false belief that one has meaningful control over a complex situation due to surface understanding. In scams, this illusion sustains engagement by making victims feel competent and informed while manipulation continues.
• Causal Explanation — A detailed, step-by-step account of how a system or event actually functions. Difficulty producing causal explanations exposes gaps in understanding and reveals cognitive illusions.
• Cognitive Bias — A systematic pattern of thinking that distorts perception, judgment, or decision making. Cognitive biases operate automatically and affect all people regardless of intelligence or education.
• Cognitive Labor Division — The social reality that knowledge is distributed across specialists rather than held individually. People often mistake access to expert knowledge for personal understanding.
• Cognitive Overconfidence — Excessive confidence in one’s reasoning or understanding that is not supported by actual knowledge. This often prevents help-seeking and increases vulnerability to manipulation.
• Conceptual Fluency — The ability to explain how something works rather than merely recognizing or using it. True fluency requires understanding mechanisms, not just terminology.
• Confirmation Patching — The process of mentally repairing inconsistencies in a false narrative rather than questioning the narrative itself. Victims use this to preserve their sense of understanding during a scam.
• Control Narrative — A simplified internal story that makes a complex situation feel manageable. Scammers encourage control narratives to prevent victims from questioning deeper inconsistencies.
• Critical Thinking Fatigue — Mental exhaustion that reduces a person’s ability to evaluate information carefully. Prolonged scams accelerate this fatigue through emotional pressure and cognitive overload.
• Dunning-Kruger Effect — A cognitive bias in which individuals with limited competence overestimate their abilities. The Illusion of Explanatory Depth is a specific expression of this bias related to explanation.
• Emotional Grooming — A manipulative process in which trust, dependency, and emotional investment are cultivated over time. Grooming creates confidence illusions that suppress skepticism.
• Explanatory Collapse — The moment when perceived understanding breaks down after attempting to explain a concept. This collapse reveals the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.
• Familiarity Heuristic — A mental shortcut that equates repeated exposure with comprehension. Familiarity creates comfort, which the brain misinterprets as knowledge.
• False Expertise Adoption — The assumption of authority or mastery based on experience alone rather than training or evidence. This often occurs when survivors prematurely position themselves as guides.
• False Recovery Model — An oversimplified belief that healing follows a short, linear checklist. This model ignores trauma complexity and often delays real recovery.
• Feynman Technique — A learning method that tests perceived understanding by requiring simple explanations to non-experts. Failure reveals incomplete knowledge structures.
• Freeze Response — A trauma response marked by emotional shutdown and inaction. Survivors may mistake this for recovery or strength when it is unresolved trauma.
• Hindsight Bias — The tendency to believe an outcome was predictable after it is known. This bias fuels self-blame after scams by distorting past perception.
• Illusion of Control — The belief that one can influence outcomes that are actually determined by external manipulation. This illusion sustains engagement during fraud.
• Illusion of Explanatory Depth — A cognitive bias where individuals believe they understand complex systems better than they actually do. It is exposed when an explanation is required.
• Information Asymmetry — A condition where one party holds substantially more accurate information than another. Scammers exploit asymmetry to maintain power.
• Intellectual Humility — The ability to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge. Humility reduces susceptibility to deception and supports effective recovery.
• Jargon Reliance — Dependence on technical language without understanding its meaning. Jargon creates confidence illusions that mask manipulation.
• Knowledge Illusion — The feeling that socially distributed knowledge belongs personally to the individual. This illusion reduces motivation to verify information.
• Linear Recovery Fallacy — The belief that emotional healing progresses in neat stages without setbacks. This belief increases shame when recovery is nonlinear.
• Manipulative Coherence — The appearance of logical consistency within a fabricated narrative. Coherence sustains trust even when the story is false.
• Mental Model — An internal representation of how a system is believed to function. Shallow mental models support illusions of understanding.
• Narrative Repair — The psychological process of restoring meaning after deception. Accurate narrative repair requires dismantling false explanations.
• Overgeneralized Understanding — The assumption that knowing a category implies understanding its specific mechanisms. This underlies many scam vulnerabilities.
• Procedural Familiarity — Knowing how to use something without understanding how it works. Procedural familiarity is often mistaken for comprehension.
• Pseudoscience Susceptibility — Increased vulnerability to false claims that sound scientific. This results from jargon reliance and shallow understanding.
• Recovery Isolation — The belief that healing should be completed alone. This belief is reinforced by cognitive overconfidence and delays in support-seeking.
• Red Flag Rationalization — The mental dismissal of warning signs by fitting them into a flawed explanation. This behavior sustains deception.
• Self Blame Loop — A repetitive cycle of guilt fueled by hindsight bias and oversimplified explanations. The loop prevents trauma processing.
• Shallow Explanation — An account that uses labels without mechanisms. Shallow explanations feel complete but lack causal detail.
• Social Engineering — The use of psychological manipulation to influence behavior. Social engineering relies heavily on cognitive biases.
• Surface Comprehension — The appearance of understanding without depth. Surface comprehension is central to the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.
• Survivor Overconfidence — Excessive belief in one’s recovery or insight before integration is complete. This can stall healing and mislead others.
• Therapeutic Complexity — The reality that trauma recovery involves neurological, emotional, and relational processes. Complexity cannot be bypassed through willpower.
• Toxic Positivity — Cultural pressure to suppress distress in favor of optimism. This reinforces false recovery models.
• Verification Avoidance — The tendency to avoid checking explanations because confidence feels sufficient. Avoidance preserves illusions.
• Victim Identity Conflict — Psychological tension between self-image and victimization. Cognitive biases intensify this conflict.
• Wisdom Integration — The process of converting experience into grounded understanding. Integration requires dismantling false explanations.