Gaining insight through explaining? How generating explanations affects individuals’ perceptions of their own and of experts’ knowledge

Abstract

When individuals in our knowledge society assess the extent of their own knowledge, they may overestimate what they actually know. But, this knowledge illusion can be reduced when people are prompted to explain the content. To investigate whether this holds true for written self-explanations about science phenomena this study transfers the Illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) paradigm to learning from a written science-related text. In an experimental group design, individuals (N = 155) first read information on artificial intelligence supported weather forecasting and then either did or did not produce a written explanation on the topic. Afterwards they rated their own knowledge on the topic, rated experts’ knowledge on the topic, answered questions on their strategies for handling scientific information and rated their own topic specific intellectual humility. Results show that participants in all experimental conditions rated their own knowledge significantly lower than that of experts; however, providing the written explanation about predicting severe weather events did not significantly affect the dependent measures. Implications address how giving explanations may influence judgements of one’s own and scientists’ knowledge in the context of reading science-related texts.