Asking Questions

At times, we may believe we know things we don’t know because of a tendency to assume that access to our extended minds and other information sources (search engines, colleagues, email-able experts) is the same as actually knowing that information.

So if we know we can quickly Google something, we might feel like we know that thing and thus treat that knowledge as “known,” on an intuitive level, despite not knowing it, and thus not being able to incorporate said knowledge into our decisions, speculations, etc.

Social pressures can also incentivize us to pretend we know things we don’t know.