Fernbach 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.

芬巴赫等人。(2013) 发现，通过要求人们为复杂的政策提供机械解释，可以减少政治极端主义和党派内部偏袒，从而使他们缺乏程序政策知识变得突出。鉴于这些发现的实际重要性，我们对 Fernbach 等人的实验 2 进行了两次预先注册的密切复制（复制 1a：N = 306；复制 1b：N = 405）和 Fernbach 等人的预先注册的密切和概念复制。 s 实验 3（复制 2：N= 343)。没有一个关键效应具有统计学意义，只有一个在小型望远镜分析中幸存下来。尽管参与者在提供机械性政策解释后报告的政策理解较少，但政策立场极端和群体内偏袒不受影响。也就是说，为先前的信念提供理由的既定发现加强了这些信念，并复制了群体内偏袒的既定发现。这些发现表明，提供机械解释会增加人们对他们无知的认识，但不太可能增加他们的政治温和，至少在这些条件下是这样。