Thanks to my colleague and friend Dr. Andrew Conway for drawing my attention to this 2002 article re problems with folk theories of psychology, and the illusion of explanatory depth. Above cartoon is one of my favorites regarding this cognitive bias (click on image to enlarge for easier reading)
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The incompleteness of everyday theories should not surprise most scientists. We frequently discover that a theory that seems crystal clear and complete in our head suddenly develops gaping holes and inconsistencies when we try to set it down on paper.
Folk theories, we claim, are even more fragmentary and skeletal, but laypeople, unlike some scientists, usually remain unaware of the incompleteness of their theories (Ahn & Kalish, 2000; Dunbar, 1995; diSessa, 1983). Laypeople rarely have to offer full explanations for most of the phenomena that they think they understand. Unlike many teachers, writers, and other professional “explainers,” laypeople rarely have cause to doubt their naïve intuitions. They believe that they can explain the world they live in fairly well. They are novices in two respects. First, they are novice “scientists”—their knowledge of most phenomena is not very deep. Second, they are novice epistemologists—their sense of the properties of knowledge itself (including how it is stored) is poor and potentially misleading.
We argue here that people's limited knowledge and their misleading intuitive epistemology combine to create an illusion of explanatory depth (IOED). Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do. The illusion for explanatory knowledge–knowledge that involves complex causal patterns—is separate from, and additive with, people's general overconfidence about their knowledge and skills. We therefore propose that knowledge of complex causal relations is particularly susceptible to illusions of understanding.
Here is link to Wikipedia IOED page.
