Understanding, fast and shallow: Individual differences in memory performance associated with cognitive load predict the illusion of explanatory depth.

Abstract

People are often overconfident about their ability to explain how everyday phenomena and artifacts work (devices, natural processes, historical events, etc.). However, the metacognitive mechanisms involved in this bias have not been fully elucidated. The aim of this study was to establish whether the ability to perform deliberate and analytic processes moderates the effect of informational cues such as the social desirability of knowledge on the Illusion of Explanatory Depth (IOED). To this purpose, the participants' cognitive load was manipulated as they provided initial estimates of causal understanding of national historical events in the standard IOED paradigm. The results showed that neither the social desirability of specific causal knowledge nor the cognitive load manipulations had direct effects on the IOED. However, subsequent exploratory analyses indicated that high cognitive load was related to lower performance on concurrent memory tasks, which in turn was associated with a higher IOED magnitude. Higher analytical processing was also related to lower IOED. Implications for both dual-process models of metacognition and the design of task environments that help to reduce this bias are discussed.