You know it? Or do you really? Or do you think you do?

As a person whose first language is not English, I found it to be quite a funny language. Why is knife pronounced as ‘nife’ but spelled with a k? Or why the past tense of ‘read' read but that ‘spell’ is  spelled. Wait, what? What is spelled you may ask. Did you catch that mistake or did you read past it?

Anyhow, I was saying that even though English was not my first language,  the medium of education for me was in fact English. However, reading Harry Potter  as a 5 year old in a pre-internet era was not as fun as one would think. Every time I came across complex words such as “forealm” or “crimplication” I would have to go up to my parents and ask them what it meant, they would invariably ask me to read out the entire sentence to them, and then explain the meaning of the word in context of the sentence that it was put in. Hence when this once I read out the sentence “ Harry was in a forealm of complications ” they were quick to say that it means Ben was in the midst of multiple complications. So, does ‘forealm’ mean in the midst of multiple? What do you think forealm means? Still not able to figure out? That’s quite alright, because its not an actual word. But why is it that if I were to put a bogus word in the middle of a sentence, they, or in this case, you would read it and attach a meaning to it? This is a phenomenon known as overclaiming.

As humans, it is crucial for us to have an accurate perception of our own skills and knowledge, but what happens when the mind fails, or when there is not enough knowledge? Does the mind simply stop and say ' I don't know" or does it try to find ways to overcome that failure?
 Well, research suggests that more often than not, the mind tends to become fairly certain about objectively inaccurate information in other words, we tend to overestimate the our knowledge.  A phenomenon known as illusion of knowledge. Also known as false certainty which can be fairly dangerous. So it wasn’t until 7^th grade that I discovered alohamora was not an actual word. A closely related concept to that is Overclaiming which refers to the phenomena in which people claim to know more than is possible or to know concepts which do not actually exist. 
In the recent 

 A recent psychological study by Plohl et al, aimed at investigating these two phenomenon. the experimenter conducted 2 experiments on 91 Slovene- speaking participants assessing overclaiming and illusion of knowledge. To assess overclaiming, participants were tested their familiarity with the bibliography of famous Slovene author Ivan Cankar. The test contained 12 items; 8 real and 4 fictitious. Participants were asked to indicate their familiarity by responding ‘yes’, which meant they were familiar with that work or ‘no’, which meant they were not familiar. The result of this first experiment indicated that more than half of the sample (56.3%)claimed to be familiar with at least one fictitious work. This indicates, that overclaiming is actually more common than one would think and in fact,  even when it's measured only dichotomously( I promise I didn't just make that one up!). 

To assess the illusion of knowledge, experimenters randomly assigned participants into two conditions- familiar and unfamiliar. They picked a topic which most people are not familiar with – nanotechnology, they then asked the participants a control question which was, “how much have you heard about nanotechnology until today?”. Then, in the familiar condition, this question was followed by a short introduction and 2 long paragraphs about nanotechnology and in the unfamiliar condition, it was followed by a only a short introduction. In both cases, the passage did not have the answer to the questions that followed. They were then asked 4 multiple-choice with three alternatives, none of which were correct. The questionnaire also contained a supplementary question about participants’ certainty of their correctness.  The results indicated that participants who received more information about nanotechnology were more certain in their answers than those who received less information. This indicates that increase in quantity of information can result in higher certainty. 

References

Plohl, N., & Musil, B. (2018). Do I know as much as I think I do? The Dunning-Kruger effect, overclaiming, and the illusion of knowledge. Psihološka Obzorja / Horizons of Psychology,20-30. doi:10.20419/2018.27.481