Ask most people to rate their understanding of how a bicycle works, and they will say eight or nine out of ten. Ask them to draw one, and the number tends to fall. That gap is the subject of an October 16 blog post by behavioral economist Dan Ariely, whose work has also appeared in publications such as Scientific American.
A Familiar Object, a Surprising Failure
Ariely’s post builds on a 2006 study by Rebecca Lawson, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool. Lawson gave participants a partial bicycle drawing that already included the wheels and handlebars, and asked them to add the frame, pedals and chain. Beforehand, participants rated their own understanding highly. Afterward, almost none of them had drawn a working bicycle, and some of the drawings were so wrong the machine could not be ridden.
Their self-ratings dropped by nearly half once they saw what they had produced. The lesson Ariely draws is not that people are foolish. It is that familiarity feels like knowledge, because the surface of an everyday object is something we encounter constantly while its mechanism is something we almost never have to reconstruct. The post is adapted from his book Misbelief.
What Rozenblit and Keil Found
The post also revisits research by Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil at Yale, described in a paper called “The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science.” They asked people to rate their understanding of everyday objects and processes, including flush toilets, helicopters, sewing machines, zippers and presidential elections. Participants were then asked to write step-by-step explanations of how each one worked.
Confidence fell sharply after the attempt, and it stayed down even after participants read expert explanations. Rozenblit and Keil named the effect the illusion of explanatory depth. Ariely’s contribution is to frame it as a practical tool: trying to explain, draw or teach something brings your self-assessment closer to what you actually know.
Dan Ariely’s Exercise for Beliefs
The post ends with an invitation. Pick a belief you hold strongly that other people do not share, then apply the same test. Where would you start if you had to explain it step by step? Where does the explanation go vague? Ariely links to a belief audit tool for readers who want a structured way to try it.
The exercise is worth taking seriously because the failure is not limited to bicycles. Ariely, whose career has run from an early academic home page at MIT to bestselling books, has spent decades studying how people make judgments they rarely stop to examine. The same gap between feeling informed and being informed, the post implies, can open up around any subject that feels familiar, which is exactly why Ariely points readers beyond bicycles to their own convictions.
The appeal of the bicycle test is its humility. It does not require an expert to correct you, only a pencil and a few honest minutes. Readers who want to follow Ariely’s ideas as they develop can find him on X at x.com/danariely. For anyone who has ever felt certain about something they could not quite explain, the drawing board is a reasonable place to start.
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