One of the most dangerous and potentially damaging forms of ignorance is not knowing what we think we know but, in fact, don’t. This inevitably results in false assumptions and premises on which incorrect decisions are based, leading to….You get the idea. The number of causal relationships that defective reasoning generates are incalculable…and the results are often disastrous.
Here is a brief excerpt from a first-rate article written by Art Markman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
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You probably don’t know as much as you think you do. When put to the test, most people find they can’t explain the workings of everyday things they think they understand.Don’t believe me? Find an object you use daily (a zipper, a toilet, a stereo speaker) and try to describe the particulars of how it works. You’re likely to discover unexpected gaps in your knowledge. In psychology, we call this cognitive barrier the illusion of explanatory depth. It means you think you fully understand something that you actually don’t.
We see this every day in buzz words. Though we often use these words, their meanings are usually unclear. They mask gaps in our knowledge, serving as placeholders that gloss concepts we don’t fully understand.
For example, several years ago, I attended a corporate meeting where the vice president spoke about streamlining business practices in the coming year. During the talk, executives around the room nodded in agreement. Afterward, though, many of them discussed what streamlining actually meant. None of the people who had nodded in agreement could exactly define the mechanics ofhow to streamline a business practice.At the other end of the spectrum, an upsetting instance of knowledge gaps in the last decade was the profound misunderstanding of complex financial products that contributed to the market collapse of 2007. Investment banks were unable to protect themselves from exposure to these products, because only a few people (either buyers or sellers) understood exactly what was being sold. Those individuals who did comprehend these product structures ultimately made huge bets against the market using credit-default swaps. The willingness of companies like AIG to sell large quantities of credit-default swaps reflected a gap in their knowledge about the riskiness of products they were insuring.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Art Markman, PhD, is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Smart Thinking: Three Essential Keys to Solve Problems, Innovate, and Get Things Done and currently editor of the journal Cognitive Science. He also consults regularly through his company Maximizing Mind. Follow him on twitter @abmarkman.
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