The unread library effect (Keil & Rozenbilt)
How do you know what you know? Maybe you don’t actually know, as the “unread library effect” may uncover. This is a scientific construct coined by Rozenblit & Keil (2002) in their paper titled “The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth” (link here). The conceptual knowledge you collect over time stems from reading books, practicing a specific activity, and consuming information about concepts and constructs through media and similar forms of information spreading. To truly understand something almost always requires delving much more deeply than that to the source of the concept, several layers through the first principle.
The unread library effect is related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which outlines how there is a negative correlation between your actual knowledge of a topic and your level of confidence to a certain extent until you have truly read almost all of the proverbial books on the topic, at which point your level of confidence increases proportionally with your degree of knowledge. The more you know, the more you discover the vast number of “books” that you haven’t read yet, which creates a sense of vast insecurity about what you know.
In everyday life, the unread library effect can be powerful in debates, conversations that require deep thinking, and for your own entertainment exploring your level of knowledge about a subject. As Lindsay and … highlight in their book “How to have impossible conversations”, this illusionary effect is one of the tools you can use to change people’s (and your own) minds by recognizing how much you don’t know, which in turn will likely make you reconsider your views on the topics of discussion away from extremisms because extremities tend to be black/white thinking, which often lacks the explanatory depth of the multiple layers required to truly know the nuances of the reality of a subject.
As a way to practice the unread library effect, you can ask “How do you know this?” several times, to yourself or others. In a deep conversation, this can lead you to truly analyze the source of the matter. If you ask this question to yourself (this can be also useful as a way to journal or reflect on a problem or decision), you can dig deep into the core of the situation you are exploring, bringing it to life in words, hence uncovering its potential and taming the possible negative emotions associated with the situation you may have been avoiding for a long time. One gets to descend into the abyss to look at the monster in the eyes oftentimes so that one can reclaim agency over the monster and realize that this too shall pass.