Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0419, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Jun;24(6):939-46. doi: 10.1177/0956797612464058. Epub 2013 Apr 25.
People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate (Experiments 1 and 2). Although these effects occurred when people were asked to generate a mechanistic explanation, they did not occur when people were instead asked to enumerate reasons for their policy preferences (Experiment 2). Finally, generating mechanistic explanations reduced donations to relevant political advocacy groups (Experiment 3). The evidence suggests that people's mistaken sense that they understand the causal processes underlying policies contributes to political polarization.
人们对于复杂的政策往往持有极端的政治态度。我们假设人们对这些政策的了解通常比他们认为的要少（解释深度的错觉），而两极化的态度是由简单的因果模型所促成的。要求人们详细解释政策，既破坏了解释深度的错觉，又导致了更为温和的态度（实验 1 和实验 2）。尽管这些效果出现在人们被要求生成机械性解释时，但当被要求列举其政策偏好的原因时，这些效果并未出现（实验 2）。最后，生成机械性解释会减少对相关政治宣传团体的捐款（实验 3）。这些证据表明，人们错误地认为自己理解了政策背后的因果过程，这导致了政治极化。
