Reading time: About 3 minutes
Do you suffer from the illusion of explanatory depth? Also known as the confidence trap, this error confuses familiarity with understanding….
Ask someone how a zipper works.
Not in a vague way. Ask them to explain it — the teeth, the slider, the mechanism that pulls two sides together into one. Most people will start confidently, then trail off somewhere around the second sentence.
This is a real experiment, by the way. Psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil ran versions of it back in 2002 and gave the phenomenon a name: the illusion of explanatory depth. We think we understand things like zippers and toilets far better than we actually do. We confuse familiarity with understanding.
I’ve been thinking about this lately because I keep hearing people say things about AI with great certainty.
The confident critics
You’ve heard them too. Maybe you are one of them. (No judgment. I used to be, too.)
AI produces boring writing. AI is always wrong. AI is going to flatten human originality into beige sludge.
Some of these claims are true. Others are entirely wrong. But here’s what fascinates me: the people making these claims most loudly are often the ones who have used the tools the least.
They’ve typed one or two prompts into ChatGPT. Something like, “Write me a blog post about leadership.” They got back a slab of hedging, three-bullet-pointed mush. And they concluded, reasonably enough, that the tool is bad.
But that’s not a verdict on AI. That’s a verdict on a single, lazy prompt.
What the illusion looks like in practice
The illusion of explanatory depth shows up when we know enough about something to recognize it, but not enough to actually work with it. We’ve seen a zipper. We use one every day. So, we feel we understand it.
AI is similar. People have seen it and read about it. Maybe they’ve even tried it once on a slow afternoon. From that thin sliver of experience, they’ve formed strong opinions that are very hard to dislodge.
Let me give you an example from my own life. For months, writers kept telling me that AI couldn’t help with their work. Their reasoning was always confident and usually shallow: “I tried it. It sounds robotic.”
When I pressed, gently, because I’m not a monster, I’d find out what they’d actually done. They’d asked the tool to write their article for them. Of course it sounded robotic. They’d handed it the whole job, including the thinking part, which is the one part no one should ever outsource.
Used that way, AI is indeed terrible. It’s like asking a hammer to build you a house and then complaining that the hammer didn’t know where to put the windows.
Where the tool actually shines
I’m not here to sell you on AI. I have plenty of reservations myself, particularly around how it’s trained and what it might be doing to the writing industry. I also worry about its environmental implications.
But I want to separate the legitimate worries from the dismissive opinions held by people who haven’t really tried.
Because used carefully, AI can be useful to writers.
It can summarize a long article faster than you can read it. It can argue against your draft if you ask it to. It’s a decent copy editor for the dull stuff, like flagging the seventeenth instance of the word “just.” It can untangle a paragraph you’ve stared at so long you can no longer see it.
What it cannot do is write your piece for you. It cannot have your ideas. The minute you ask it to do those things, you get the beige sludge everyone complains about.
Why this matters beyond AI
Here’s the larger point, and the one I want you to think about.
The illusion of explanatory depth is not really about AI. It’s about how all of us think about every topic we encounter. We dip a toe in. We form a strong opinion. Then we defend that opinion as though we’ve done the reading.
This same pattern shows up in politics and nutrition. It shows up in parenting advice. It even shows up in writing advice, which is one reason I’m careful about how I dispense it. We mistake exposure for expertise.
The cure is to remember you don’t know everything. Nobody knows everything. The cure is a small, slightly annoying habit: catching yourself in the moment of certainty and asking, do I actually understand this, or have I just seen it before?
The honest position
If you’ve never seriously tried using AI for your writing, you don’t yet know what it can and can’t do for you. You know what one bad prompt produces. That’s a different thing.
I’m not asking you to love the tools. I’m asking you to notice the difference between an informed view and a familiar one.
Because the next time you find yourself absolutely sure about something, whether it’s AI or anything else, it’s worth asking how many zipper-level explanations are hiding inside your certainty.
Probably more than you think.
I’m teaching a class on AI on Thursday, describing how to use it, what it’s actually good at and where it bites. You can get the $35 early-bird price until the class starts. After that, it’s $65.
Something I’m loving right now…
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My video podcast last week addressed how much editing is too much editing. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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Have you ever fallen into the confidence trap? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me in the comments section, below. If you comment on today’s post (or any others) by June 30/26, I’ll put you in a draw for a digital copy of my first book, 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. To enter, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
