Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While explanations provide the power to understand the worldaround us, people are often overconfident about their ownunderstanding. We explored how people’s perceptions of theirunderstanding of phenomena is related to endorsement ofconspiracy theories. We first tested people’s perceptions oftheir understanding of the 2016 Presidential electoral processand then measured their beliefs that the election itself wasillegitimate, a form of conspiratorial belief. We found thatparticipants who still endorsed high levels of understandingafter generating an explanation for the 2016 election were alsomore likely to endorse the election was illegitimate. However,this finding only obtained for participants who voted for thelosing candidate. These results suggest interesting avenues forexploring individual differences that may be related to theillusion of explanatory depth.