Imagination Inflation

In one of my all-time favorite (non-fiction) books, Make it Stick by Peter Brown, he writes, among a myriad of other things, that writing things down helps adults ensure that they are locked into memory. Makes sense. Teachers have been saying that for years in every class you've ever been in right? Don't just highlight, don't just read, write it down. Another great step is to elaborate and summarize. 

Why summarize? 

Well there is something out there called the Dunning Kruger effect. Basically, this is the idea that people with high competency and ability generally have low confidence but those with low competence and ability will in some cases have too high confidence in their abilities. 

The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when a person's lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, and underestimate their relative abilities as well.

A part of this is "the illusion of knowing" which Make it Stick goes over in some detail in Chapter 5. But I found this amazing table that summarizes it all in a really nice way and brings up some amazing tangential concepts. This comes from Korsakas (2021)

• We tend to selectively look for evidence that confirms our beliefs or values (while ignoring contrary information) – confirmation bias
• We tend to think that we knew something was going to happen after the event has already happened, or in other words, we have a tendency to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were – hindsight bias
• We tend to believe that we understand complex phenomena quite well and deeply when in in reality we have a superficial understanding at best – the illusion of explanatory depth
• Our memories are influenced by our social circle, and if several people report that something has happened slightly differently from the way you remember it has happened, then these other memories by other people will be incorporated into your memory (although they might be false) – memory conformity
• We tend to believe that other people share our beliefs, and while that might not be true – false consensus effect
• Our decisions tend to be influenced by a particular reference point aka an anchor – anchoring
• We tend to ascribe success to ourselves, while failure to external factors – self-serving bias
• We tend to rely on things or examples that are easy to recall on the spot when making a decision, if a memory is more difficult to recall we often deem it less important – availability heuristic
• If somebody asks you to imagine a fictitious event vividly you might begin believing that this event has actually happened – imagination inflation
• Often if we do not stop to think and go with our intuition we are susceptible to various biases and can make mistakes (of course, this is not always the case, intuition can often be useful) – this is known as system 1 thinking and incorporates a lot of the aforementioned biases

It's that idea of summarizing that helps people realize that they don't have that illusion of explanatory depth and could potentially help stay out of the Dunning Kruger effect. So, here I am summarizing these concepts so that hopefully I will remember them later. 

Korsakas, D. (2021, November 13). What are illusions of knowing? And how to avoid them? Learning Rabbit Hole. https://learningrabbithole.com/what-are-illusions-of-knowing-and-how-to-avoid-them/