Rate Your Goal Plan From 1 to 7, Then Write Out Every Step

Picture a graduate student at Yale, seated at a table with a booklet. The first page asks how well she understands a zipper, on a scale from 1 to 7. She has used thousands of them. She circles a 6, maybe a 7. The next page asks her to write out, step by step, how a zipper works. The pen stops. Something about the teeth, something about the slider pulling them together, and then nothing she can put in a sentence. The third page asks for the rating again.

That is a reconstruction, but the procedure is the one Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil used in the first study of their 2002 paper in Cognitive Science, “The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth” (volume 26, pages 521-562). Sixteen Yale graduate students rated their understanding of everyday devices on a 7-point scale, wrote explanations, and rated again. The devices included a speedometer, a zipper, a piano key, a flush toilet, a cylinder lock, a helicopter, a quartz watch and a sewing machine. Ratings fell after the explaining step.

Rozenblit and Keil named the gap between the first rating and the second the illusion of explanatory depth. Their paper reported twelve studies in all, and one finding matters for anyone with a goal: the illusion was stronger for explanations of how things work than for facts, procedures or narratives. Knowing that a zipper closes feels like knowing how. The feeling is cheap and the knowledge is not.

What is the illusion of explanatory depth?

The illusion of explanatory depth is the tendency to rate your understanding of a mechanism as detailed until you are asked to explain it, at which point you discover the detail was never there.

Rozenblit and Keil pointed to a few likely contributors. People can confuse what they can see of an object with what they understand about it, because the visible parts of a zipper are right there to look at. Familiarity can also pass for comprehension, and people are rarely tested, since most conversations never require anyone to produce the steps. Knowledge that lives in the world (the zipper is in your hand) can pass for knowledge in your head.

The drop is also informative about direction. Participants did not become more confident after trying to explain; the attempt exposed missing links, and the second rating came down.

Why would a goal plan behave like a toilet?

A goal plan is a causal story: if I do A, then B happens, which makes C possible. “I’ll get fit by summer” is a sentence about an outcome, and the brain treats a sentence about an outcome as if the route were attached. The route usually is not.

The cleanest evidence that this happens to plans, as opposed to toilets, would be a study that had people rate and then write out their own goal plans. This post does not claim one exists. What the research supports is narrower and still useful. The illusion appears wherever people hold a causal model they have never had to externalize, and it is weaker for plain procedures than for mechanisms, which cuts against the assumption that plans are immune because they feel like lists. A plan that is mostly “then it happens” sits on the mechanism side of that line. The 10-minute test below is the Rozenblit and Keil procedure pointed at a new target, an inference from their results and not a result of its own.

There is nearby evidence that gaps between a plan and the facts of the world are common. In the 1994 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper “Exploring the ‘planning fallacy’” (volume 67, pages 366-381), Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked 37 psychology students to predict when they would finish their senior theses. The average prediction was about 34 days; the average actual time was about 55 days, and only about 30 percent finished within their own estimate. A plan can feel complete and run 60 percent over. If you have ever wondered why the schedule never matched the calendar, one answer is that the schedule was never explained at the level of steps. For more on the forecasting side, the planning-fallacy post in this blog covers that literature on its own terms.

What happens when people have to explain instead of feel?

Frank Keil’s group was not the only one to test explaining as an intervention. In 2013, Philip Fernbach, Todd Rogers, Craig Fox and Steven Sloman reported in Psychological Science that when people were asked to explain how a policy such as a cap-and-trade system would work, their self-rated understanding dropped, as it had for zippers. The result held for mechanistic explanations and not when participants only listed reasons for their view. Reasons can borrow from values and hearsay, so they can be produced without knowing how anything works. Steps cannot.

The follow-on claim in that paper, that the explaining also made political attitudes more moderate, has not held up as well. Jarret Crawford and John Ruscio reported three preregistered attempts in Psychological Science in 2021 that failed to closely replicate it. The part relevant here is the first one: that trying to explain the mechanism lowers confidence in your own understanding. That is the Rozenblit and Keil finding, and the one this post relies on — the rest can be set aside.

Notice what the contrast tells you about plans. “Why I want this” is a list of reasons, and reasons feel abundant. “How this will happen on Wednesday” is an explanation, and it exposes holes. Most goal-setting advice gets people to produce the first and mistake it for the second.

How do you run the 10-minute explain-it test?

This is an adaptation, not the original protocol. It keeps the three beats of the study (rate, explain, re-rate) and adds one repair step.

Minutes 0 to 2: rate. Write down one goal plan in a sentence. Under it, rate on a 1 to 7 scale how clearly you could explain how you will get from today to done, where 1 means you could only gesture at it and 7 means you could hand the steps to a stranger. Write the number down before the next step. Skipping the number removes the thing that makes the second rating meaningful.

Minutes 2 to 8: explain. Write the steps as if someone who has never met you has to carry them out on your behalf. For each step, write four things: what is done, when and where it happens, what must already be true for it to start (a gym bag packed, a form filled out, a person who said yes), and what you do if it fails. Use full sentences. Bullets let you skip the connective tissue, and the connective tissue is the point of the exercise.

Mark every place you reach for a verb that does no work: “get into shape,” “stay consistent,” “make time,” “be disciplined,” “figure out.” Those are the zipper’s teeth. Each one is a step that has been replaced by its own name.

Minutes 8 to 10: re-rate and repair. Give the same 1 to 7 rating again. Then pick the single weakest marked step and rewrite it until it names an action, a place and a time. If you cannot, that is the finding: the plan depends on something you have not yet worked out, and the next task is working it out, not starting.

Expect the number to drop by a point or two, and treat the drop as good news.

Where do plans usually go missing?

The gaps tend to cluster in three places.

The first is the hand-off between decision and action: “I’ll go to the gym after work” does not say what happens at 5:40 when you are tired. The second is a dependency you have not secured, such as a partner’s schedule, a budget line or a quiet hour.

The third is the first step itself, which is where mornings come in. Plans that require waking earlier often skip the moment of waking in their written steps. The plan says “up at 6, then run.” The explanation has to say what gets you from asleep to upright, and in many written plans the honest answer is a sentence like “then I get up.” That is the unexplained zipper. A hard 30-second window to film yourself out of bed, with a random camera-roll photo going to your friends for 48 hours if the window passes, is one way to make that step real, and it is how DontSnooze works on iOS. Whether you use an app or a different device, the test asks the same of the step: name the action, name the deadline, name what happens if it is missed.

Questions about the explain-it test

Does the explain-it test work for goals that are mostly about willpower, like quitting sugar?

Yes, but the steps look different. Instead of logistics, you write the sequence for the moment of temptation: where you are, what the cue is, what your hands do next, and what happens at the point you usually fold. If the sequence reads “then I resist”, that is the gap. Plans built on a single act of resisting are the ones most likely to come back with a 3 or 4 on the second rating.

Should someone else read the written steps?

It helps but is not required. In the original studies, participants re-rated their own understanding after writing their own explanations, so the drop did not depend on anyone grading them. A second reader adds a different benefit: a stranger asks “and then what?” at the exact step you skipped, which you cannot do to yourself. If you do show it to someone, pick a person who has not heard you describe the goal out loud.

How often should I repeat the test?

Once per plan, then again when the plan changes or stalls. A plan that has survived two weeks of contact with reality has usually had its worst gaps exposed already. Repeat it sooner if you notice you keep postponing the same step; a step you avoid doing is often a step you never explained.

Is a vague plan always a bad plan?

No. For work that depends on discovery, such as a first draft or a new training block, the steps cannot all be known in advance. The test still applies to the first move and the checkpoint: you should be able to explain what you will do in the first session and how you will know when to revise. What fails is a vague plan that feels finished.

Why write it down when you already know what you mean?

Because “I know what I mean” is the rating you gave on page one. The result of the 2002 study is that the feeling of knowing and the ability to explain come apart, and the feeling does not warn you. Writing is the cheapest way to make the two meet before the calendar does it for you.

The Ebbinghaus goal-forgetting post covers what happens to a goal written once and then left alone; the test here is the other half of that advice, which is to write the steps and then read them back as a skeptic.

A written explanation also behaves like a checklist when it is done well. Checklists earn their keep when each line names an action someone can verify, which is the standard that the checklist evidence from hospitals keeps arriving at: a line that says “ensure safety” does less than a line that says “confirm the patient’s name aloud.” Your plan’s lines face the same standard.

What to do with the result today

Pick the goal you have been circling longest. Set a timer for ten minutes and rate it before you write a word. Write the steps with the four fields for each. Underline every verb that stands in for work. Re-rate. Rewrite the one weakest step until it has a place, a time and a fallback, and put that step on tomorrow’s calendar as the first thing you will do.

If the second number is lower than the first, the test has done what it did for sixteen graduate students and a zipper: it moved your sense of understanding closer to what you actually know, and it did it before the plan had to carry any weight.