Link to full text here: cognition.princeton.edu/sites/g/file...

cognition.princeton.edu/publications...

In lots of cases that's enough to get by in the world: it tells us what search terms to use, maybe who to ask. But that doesn't mean we infer the meaning of the jargon or connect it deeply with what we already believe about what's being explained.

I don't think it's *only* a credibility cue - we did find that our participants judged the explanations with jargon to have come from a more expert source, but that didn't fully explain the interaction with explanation completeness. One possibility is that jargon is like an explanation placeholder..

I suspect that there are boundary conditions on these effects (e.g., if the source isn't trusted for other reasons), but we didn't test that in this set of studies.

We did! We consistently found that jargon increased the perceived expertise of the source for both poor (nearly circular) and good explanations, and in one study made participants judge the explanations more likely to be true...

In this example the jargon was made up! In some of our studies we used real jargon, and in other studies we used invented jargon (so that we could be sure the jargon was not conveying any additional content beyond the presence of jargon itself). But "candy triboluminescence" is a real phenomenon!

This project was a collaboration with @cruzf.bsky.social, who visited my lab at Princeton as an international PhD student. A reminder that science is richer and better when we work together - it makes the US richer and better, too.

Check out our paper for more! doi.org/10.1038/s415...

This doesn't imply that people are stupidly bamboozled by jargon - in many cases, jargon can be a good cue to expertise and it can offer a pointer to expert knowledge. But in everyday cases (like short science explanations in headlines), jargon can create an inflated sense of satisfaction...

We also found that we could reduce the elevated sense of explanation quality engendered by jargon by having people *try to generate their own explanations.* When they did so, they better appreciated the gaps in their own understanding, and that they weren't filled by jargon.

But when explanations are more complete, adding jargon decreases comprehensibility without increasing satisfaction. There aren't obvious gaps for the jargon to fill. We found this across a range of explanations, some with real jargon and some with made-up jargon (like the example)...

"Have you ever noticed that crunching candy can sometimes release a spark of light? That's because, *when candy is crushed*, this can result in visible light" vs *when candy plotens are crushed*. This explanation was judged more satisfying when it contained the extra jargon!

When people receive poor (nearly circular) explanations with jargon, they assume the jargon fills explanatory gaps. So jargon makes the explanation seem more complete and more satisfying. Compare the following two examples:

Consistent with prior work, we find that jargon typically makes explanations seem less *comprehensible* to laypeople. Yet, sometimes, it can also make explanations seem *more explanatory.* Across 9 experiments with over 6K participants, we reveal why...