How can someone dare to say “I know this” when I made it up?!

If you are a loyal fan of Guokr and love psychology, then you must be very familiar with the Pygmalion effect, the diffusion of responsibility effect and the door-breaking effect, right?

Okay. Were you smiling and nodding to indicate "of course I'm familiar with this" or were you trying hard to recall the unfamiliar "door-breaking effect"?

In fact, this so-called "breaking door effect" is something I made up.

However, even if you use this kind of made-up terminology to ask people with rich knowledge of psychology, maybe some people will still nod in agreement!

Look, they're acting great! Psychologists have long known that, in many areas, most people think they're above average for the population—and that's often unrealistic. Psychologists have a name for this illusion: the "above average effect" (it's real!).

In 2003, Delroy Paulhus, a psychology researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and his colleagues found that people would claim to know words that did not exist. In one experiment, they "synthesized" 30 non-existent concepts, making them look like proper names in certain fields, and then mixed these made-up words with 120 real words and asked the participants: "Are you familiar with this word?"

The fishing study found that 25% of people claimed to be familiar with "professional terms" that did not exist. Paulus and others call this phenomenon "overclaiming", which shows that people may unconsciously exaggerate their abilities.

This famous event later evolved into a postmodern carnival - most of the reviews of this "movie" you see on the Internet are actually deliberately fabricated by netizens who know the truth.

In addition to pretending to be "glossary", people may also talk about an issue they don't understand. In the 1970s, American psychologists interviewed some Americans and asked them what they thought of the "Public Affairs Act of 1975". Although this bill did not exist at all, one-third of the interviewees still expressed their "in-depth" insights.

This phenomenon is so common that even now there is still no shortage of TV shows that are keen on showing people "talking nonsense in a serious manner."

Jimmy Kimmel Live's "Bullshit Interview" is a stock footage of the "over-claiming" phenomenon | Video source: Jimmy Kimmel Live Translation: Gu Dabaihua

“Seeming to Know” vs. Memory Retrieval

Why do people over-claim on some issues? Stav Atir and David Dunning from the Department of Psychology at Cornell University and Emily Rosenzweig from the Department of Marketing at Tulane University recently proposed a possible explanation: when people assess whether they know something, they do not really test their memory and knowledge storage, but rely on a sense of "knowing", that is, they seem to know that something is going on. However, in areas that people claim to be familiar with, this sense of "knowing" is often not objective.

In other words, in that context, people may not be bragging intentionally, but rather being deceived by their own feelings.

Artest and his colleagues conducted a series of fishing experiments to test this hypothesis and published their findings in the journal Psychological Science. They initially recruited two groups of volunteers (100 and 202 people) and asked them to self-assess their level of financial knowledge.

Then, the researchers gave the volunteers 15 "financial terms" - only 12 of which were real terms and 3 were made up by the researchers - and asked them to judge their familiarity with these words. In the test of the second group of volunteers, the researchers also used a financial knowledge test to test the volunteers' real financial knowledge level.

In both groups of volunteers, more than 90% said "I am familiar with this word" to at least one of the made-up words. The researchers found that the more the volunteers believed that they had a high level of financial knowledge and the stronger their "sense of knowing" was, the more likely they were to over-claim that they were familiar with those non-existent "terms".

What seems unexpected, but also reasonable, is that those who have a higher level of financial knowledge are more likely to "over-pretend" on the test. This is actually easy to understand: their financial knowledge is indeed better than the average person, so their "sense of knowing" in this regard may be correspondingly inflated.

Hey, don't rush to make fun of friends in the financial industry, this phenomenon is not limited to the field - in subsequent experiments, the researchers used nouns and terms in biology, geography and other fields to test volunteers and also found the same phenomenon. It can be imagined that the consequences of this effect are not always just a simple "gaffe".

How can I stop myself from doing something that sounds so stupid? Actually, it's very simple - when asked such a question, remind myself to carefully search my memory and face the facts, instead of following my feelings without thinking.

Author: hcp4715

Editor: Calo