Don’t forget the world outside the lab – a comment on “Illusions of Understanding in the Sciences”

Abstract

The article “Illusions of Understanding in the Sciences” by Shiffrin et al. (2026) describes ways in which scientists can mislead themselves and others about the extent to which they understand the (causal underpinnings of) phenomena they research. In this reply, we highlight how such “illusions of understanding” can arise from researchers overestimating the extent to which their results generalize beyond curated lab conditions. Since experimental designs are informed by researchers’ theoretical lenses and methodological preferences, we argue that interdisciplinary work (which exposes one to different lenses) on more applied problems (which exposes one to less idealized conditions) can reveal such illusions.