When we said that scientists had not yet explained the glowing rocks<br />and then asked our respondents how well they understood how such rocks glow, they reported not understanding at all — a very natural response given that they knew nothing about the rocks.<br />One consequence of the fact that knowledge is distributed this way is<br />that being part of a community of knowledge can make people feel as if they understand things they don’t.<br />This line of thinking leads to explanations of the hoodwinked masses<br />that amount to little more than name calling: “Those people are foolish” or “Those people are monsters.”<br />Such accounts may make us feel good about ourselves, but they are misguided and simplistic: They reflect a misunderstanding of knowledge<br />that focuses too narrowly on what goes on between our ears.<br />People fail to distinguish what they know from what others know<br />because it is often impossible to draw sharp boundaries between what knowledge resides in our heads and what resides elsewhere.<br />But when we told another group about the same discovery, only this time claiming<br />that scientists had explained how the rocks glowed, our respondents reported a little bit more understanding.<br />They are the authors of the forthcoming “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.”<br />A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 5, 2017, on Page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Why We Believe Obvious Untruths.<br />Recently, one of us ran a series of studies in which we told people about some new scientific discoveries that we fabricated, like rocks that glow.
