Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The community of knowledge hypothesis holds that people estimate their level of understanding by relying on the perceived knowledge of others. Prior work describes a "contagious sense of understanding," in which self-assessed understanding increases when experts are believed to understand an issue. However, because prior studies examined only two conditions, experts understanding or not understanding, the effect's direction remains unclear as it lacks a baseline without information about others' knowledge levels. Across three experiments (N = 1080), a neutral condition was added while replicating the paradigm. Across all experiments, self-rated understanding was lower in the expert-not-understanding condition compared to both the neutral and expert-understanding conditions, with no difference between the latter two, for both public policy proposals and novel scientific phenomena. Thus, the effect reflects decreases in perceived understanding when experts lack understanding, not increases when expert understanding is explicit, suggesting a contagious sense of incomprehension rather than a contagious sense of understanding.