You Think You Understand… But Do You? The Science of Human Explanation | Dr. Tania Lombrozo

Benjamin Hopkins (0:04)

Dr. Tania Lombrozo, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate you in having agreed to do this in advance.

Tania Lombrozo (0:10)

Thanks for having me.

Benjamin Hopkins (0:11)

You've gone down an interesting rabbit hole through psychology into what you've studied recently and written your latest book about, which is all about sort of why we ask why, right? Why that sort of need and almost human need to understand, where did the original motivations for that come from?

Tania Lombrozo (0:27)

Yeah, so I think they have a few different sources. Part of my initial motivation for studying the topic of human explanation came from the fact that I kept encountering it again and again in two ways. One was in the course of my everyday life and the other was the course of my academic studies. So in everyday life, I feel like I and many people are like this, I think, have a pretty persistent voice in our head that's asking why. We want to understand why various things about our environment are the way they are, why a friend is mad, why we feel a particular way, why the sky is blue and so on. On the one hand, it felt like this very pervasive feature of human experience. And then on the other hand, as I became an undergraduate at the university and started to get exposed to ideas in philosophy and psychology and other disciplines, it seems like explanation kept coming up again and again. So for example, I took a course in philosophy of science, and one of the main topics that philosophers of science are interested in is what it is that makes something a good scientific explanation and why it is that science should concern itself so much with trying to explain why is that such a valuable goal or pursuit for science.

So I think seeing this on these two planes, the everyday experience side, but then also being appealed to in all of these academic contexts where it seemed to be very theoretically important really told me, there's something interesting here that is worth exploring scientifically and that's also going to be a fascinating adventure in terms of learning about my own experience as a human.

Benjamin Hopkins (1:46)

Absolutely. It goes back to my experience of being a human as well. I think when I was sort of late teens, maybe early 20s, I came across Carl Rogers' work and he had this explanation of, I think he put, most cognitive problems are down to an incongruence between your ideal self and your current self. And I didn't necessarily agree with the notion or know enough to agree or disagree. I hadn't really done the work to have an opinion on it, but I remember it struck me at the time of, I liked the idea that there was a me now and a future me to sort of strive towards. Building that gap seemed like a worthwhile goal and then you double click on it further and it's almost, you get to, you're trying to sort of fill that cognitive void of I'm trying to answer my own questions and try to ask why for myself. It's an innately human thing.

How do you think, maybe a slightly different lens, but how do you think that evolved to have this, we've all had that feeling of dissonance when we can't explain why, this is an curiosity. How do you think that, was it maybe an adaptive response in our evolution, do you think?

Tania Lombrozo (2:43)

Yeah, that's a great question and almost anything I say is going to be speculation. So with that caveat, I'm happy to speculate. So there's a lot of places where we see a lot of continuity between humans and non-human animals. So for example, non-human animals seem to exhibit curiosity about the world, they seem to explore the world, they're certainly engaged in processes of learning and try to create representations that are going to help them guide their decisions, anticipate what's going to happen in their environment and so on. So I think a lot of our learning mechanisms are shared with non-human animals and probably have a similar evolutionary history. And then I think there's maybe two ways that we're interestingly different that I think are related to our drive to explain. One of those has to do with the role of language and communication. So again, lots of non-human animals have systems for communication, but nobody has human-like language besides humans. We have an extremely sophisticated and flexible form of communication. And so if you think about the role that explanations play, one important role they play is in trying to make sense of things for ourselves. But another really important role they play is in communicating our understanding to other people and receiving other people's understanding. And so I think the moment you have an incredibly rich medium-like language that you can use to transmit explanations, understanding across organisms, that's going to start to then have all sorts of other learning processes piggyback on that. So that's one important part. And the other, I think, important observation about what differentiates humans from many other species is the flexibility of how we can learn. So we are able to adapt ourselves to all kinds of different environments that depart from the original context in which we evolved in lots of ways. It seems like one of the really remarkable things about humans is our flexibility. And I think one of the things that learning through explaining gets us is a very broad learning process that allows us to generate an understanding of entirely new contexts and phenomena in a way that allows us to flexibly generalize to new cases.