Ep. 72: Know-It-All Teens

Dr. Steven Sloman, co-author of The Knowledge Illusion and professor at Brown University, joins Andy for a conversation on knowledge, making deliberate decisions, and how to talk to your teen about the gaps in their knowledge around things like vaping.

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Full show notes

“Mom! Dad! Shut up! You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Have you ever heard these words fly out of the mouth of your teenager?

If there were a remote control for a parent’s behavior, these words would probably be the equivalent of the “Volume Up” button.

Why do these words sting so much? Well, press the “Pause” button and consider this:

Your teenagers might be right. You might not know what you’re talking about. What’s frustrating, though, is that your teens probably don't know what they’re talking about either!

But what even were you “talking” about? Let’s take the hot-button topic for example: teens and vaping.

Is vaping bad for teens? Your gut instinct might be to say, “Yes! Of course it is!” But can you explain why? Can you describe how their lungs are absorbing this vapor and how their brains are reacting to the chemicals?

If you tell your teen that vaping is bad, but can’t explain why, then you might just be told:

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! Shut up!”

Knowledge on a topic like teens and vaping might seem peripheral. If you are concerned about your teens and vaping, you won’t change their behavior by claiming knowledge you don’t have.

So what can you do? You can’t be expected to know everything about every subject of controversy! To get some ideas, I spoke with knowledge expert, Dr. Steven Sloman.

Dr. Sloman is a leading researcher on the human mind, a professor at Brown University, and co-author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. He’s an expert on how humans think, and he has one or two ideas on how to work with teens who think they know everything. His book isn’t specifically about teens, but it touches on prevalent issues during the teen years. I was eager to ask Dr. Sloman about human thinking during the teenage years, and how parents might apply his wisdom to issues like teens and vaping.

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth

Parents of teens might be very familiar with the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, even if they’ve never heard of it before. It is the illusion that people understand something when in fact they don’t.

Dr. Sloman cites a Yale study in which people were asked to rate their knowledge of everyday objects. The subjects were presented zippers, toilets, and pens, and asked how well they thought they understood how each one worked. The data shows all the subjects felt pretty confident in their understanding of such everyday objects. But this illusion was burst when the researchers asked the subjects to explain how those objects worked in as much detail as possible!

As it turned out, the subjects didn’t really have much to say. When the researchers asked the subjects to rate themselves a second time on how well they knew those objects, they lowered their rating. This demonstrates the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, that people think they know more than they really do.

So this isn’t really a teen problem, or even a problem linked to teens and vaping. It’s a people problem. Still, the Illusion of Explanatory Depth seems to show up a lot during the teenage years. Your teen might yell, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” but the Illusion of Explanatory Depth suggests your teen doesn’t know what they’re talking about, either. In fact, they’re more unaware than you of how much they’re living in an illusion. How might we go about addressing issues of teens and vaping?

Why Would Anyone Live in an Illusion?

In order to address the illusion of knowledge in teens, Dr. Sloman first asks:

“Why would anybody live in this illusion of understanding?”

He proposes that we live this way because we fail to distinguish what we know from what other people know. You think you understand how the toilet works because there’s a plumber who understands how the toilet works. You have access to the plumber’s knowledge, but the knowledge is sitting in the plumber’s head, not in yours.

Dr. Sloman explains that the reason we have this illusion is because, in a sense, we do understand! It’s not every individual that understands, but the collective communities that understand. And communities can succeed when everyone has specialized knowledge to share.

Who Do You Trust?

Every day we are taking advantage of other peoples’ knowledge. As long as we can use our toilet, we don’t need to know how the toilet works. Our lack of understanding doesn’t matter until the toilet brakes. Then we realize how dependent we are on the plumber.

This subconscious dependency on other people creates an interesting scenario for teenagers. Teens are caught in a high stakes decision where they have to choose which community they’re going to go along with and rely on for knowledge. They’re wondering what they should believe, how they should behave, and who they should hang around with. Dr. Sloman points out that all these identity questions will shape how teens experience the illusion of knowledge.

Since teens have so much curiosity, what they choose to believe quickly becomes a question of: Who do I trust? Whose ideas am I going to accept?

Exposing the Illusion

Dr. Sloman explains that we make decisions by virtue of the fact that people around us are also making decisions. For example, the best predictor of whether or not someone will give up vaping is whether or not their spouse has given up vaping.

When discussing teens and vaping, Dr. Sloman points out that oftentimes kids pick up the habit from their peers. So simply exposing your teen’s illusion of knowledge won’t be enough to convince them to stop. In a way, it’s most effective to convince the whole group on the issues of teens and vaping, so it’s best to operate at the social level.

On an issue like teens and vaping it’s even harder to convince a teen to quit because the research on vaping is somewhat inconclusive. You can ask teens to explain how vaping works, like in the study at Yale, but you might get a mixed bag of results.

If you sit down with kids who vape and ask them how it works, you might easily expose their lack of understanding. They might say,

“Well, you fill it up here, you press the button here, and it tastes like bubblegum.”

You can press them for further explanation on all three of those steps. Even if they seem super confident in their knowledge, a barrage of follow-up questions will quickly expose how little they know about the device and what’s in it. You can get them to doubt how much they know about vaping, and this is good! By breaking attachments they have to their preexisting understanding of teen...