Illusion of Explanatory Depth

Coined by psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil of Yale University in their 2002 paper "The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science: An Illusion of Explanatory Depth", published in Cognitive Science. They demonstrated that the illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than for facts, procedures, or narratives, particularly where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms.