Think you know the best way to study? Better test yourself.

By Daniel Simons, on January 25th, 2011

What is the best way to study for an exam? Do you think you know? Better test […]

Category: illusion, intuition, knowledge | 2 comments

You can't anticipate everything

By Daniel Simons, on August 11th, 2010

A standard approach to safety engineering is to try to define all of the potential risks in advance and to design protocols that, if followed precisely, will avoid all of the known hazards. Such safety-by-protocol is great in principle, but it has a critical failing: The illusion of knowledge. The approach assumes that […]

Category: examples, gorillas, intuition, knowledge | 6 comments

Predicting learning and the illusion of knowledge

By Daniel Simons, on August 3rd, 2010

In The Invisible Gorilla, Chris and I discuss many aspects of the illusion of knowledge, the tendency to think we have a better understanding than we actually do. One aspect of this illusion is that we easily mistake surface understanding for deep understanding, what Leon Rozenblit and Frank Keil called the “illusion of explanatory […]

Category: experiments, intuition, knowledge | 3 comments