et al 2013 found that political extremism and partisan in-group favoritism can be reduced by asking people to provide mechanistic explanations for complex policies, thus making their lack of procedural-policy knowledge salient.
Given the practical importance of these findings, we conducted two preregistered close replications of Fernbach et al.’s Experiment 2 (Replication 1a: n = 306; Replication 1b: n = 405) and preregistered close and conceptual replications of Fernbach et al.’s Experiment 3 (Replication 2: n = 343).
None of the key effects were statistically-significant, and only one survived a small-telescopes analysis. Although participants reported less policy understanding after providing mechanistic policy explanations, policy-position extremity and in-group favoritism were unaffected.
That said, well-established findings that providing justifications for prior beliefs strengthens those beliefs, and well-established findings of in-group favoritism, were replicated. These findings suggest that providing mechanistic explanations increases people’s recognition of their ignorance but is unlikely to increase their political moderation, at least under these conditions.