Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study demonstrates a new approach for boosting peoples decision-making abilities. Previous studies have demon-strated that those who have less knowledge are more likely to make a scientifically biased decision. Therefore, we canexpect that providing them with more knowledge can reduce their biases. However, since people have difficulty changingtheir minds in response to knowledge that contradicts their opinions, it is unclear whether people accept and appropriatelyunderstand the provided knowledge. To more efficiently help these people, this study focused on the illusion of explanatorydepth, which means that the knowledge people think they have is greater than the knowledge they actually possess. Weconducted two experiments and demonstrated that (i) those who had a stronger illusion of explanatory depth were morelikely to make a logically biased decision, and (ii) by informing them of their illusion and providing them with objectiveknowledge, we could reduce their bias.