What Is The Curse of Knowledge?
Brothers Chip and Dan Heath are co-authors of four New York Times best sellers that have sold more than 3 million copies in 33 languages. Chip is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke University. Writing in Harvard Business Review, these educators say top executives are almost always guilty of using verbal shorthand. “They have had years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in their heads.”
So what’s the concept here?
Once we know something, we can’t imagine not knowing it, so we assume lots of other people must know it, too. It’s a cognitive bias and it’s called the curse of knowledge. It occurs when a speaker or writer assumes that others have the background and training to understand. You might hear it called the expert’s curse.
You’ll find the curse of knowledge in college classrooms everywhere
Teachers accumulate a great deal of specialized knowledge over the years. They know so much that they are not able to walk in the students’ moccasins. Forbes says experts’ brains are so hardwired at advanced levels that they’re likely to forget what is was like for them when they were beginners. They talk to students as they do with their colleagues, using a verbal shorthand understood only by other specialists. Having learned something, they lost the ability to remember what it was like to not know it. Wikipedia says “This curse of knowledge also explains the danger behind thinking about student learning based on what appears best to faculty members, as opposed to what has been verified with students.”
Some teachers deliberately talk over students’ heads
A few use highfalutin’ language to impress students with their vocabularies and show off how much they know. But as a colleague once said, “Showing how smart you are isn’t a very good way of showing how smart you are.”
Some of the professors I knew grudgingly agreed to climb down from the towers and give it a try
A few of them expressed their scorn for the idea of explaining things simply by calling it farmerization, their disdainful word for dumbing things down. Simplifying is not dumbing down. It takes the kind work they may consider beneath them. The Arkansas Philosopher, a true rustic, shook her head while listening to a pompous pontificator, turned to me and whispered, “Why doesn’t he put the hay down where the goats can get it?”
While working on her doctorate, Stanford psychologist Elizabeth Newton devised a laboratory experiment
She recruited two groups of people and told them one group will be tappers and the other will be listeners. Tappers were instructed to use their fingertips to tap out tunes from a list of very well-known songs. No music, no words, just tapping on a tabletop. Listeners were asked to name the songs the tappers were “playing.”
How many do you think correctly named that tune?
Before the tapping started, Newton asked the tappers to predict how many songs listeners would be able to identify correctly. On average, tappers guessed listeners would be able to name the tune about half of the time.
What happened?
Tappers tapped out the melodies to 120 songs. Listeners could not identify 117 of them.
Why were tappers astounded by that number?
They couldn’t believe so many wrong guesses when the tune was so obvious. Obvious to them, of course, because while they were tapping, they were hearing the melody playing in their heads. Tappers had inside information (120 songs were obvious) and listeners didn’t (3 were obvious).
Your storehouse of knowledge is useless if you can’t connect with your listeners and readers
A better way is to explain unfamiliar and complicated things is to do it so simply that everyone can understand it, then connecting it with something they already know. Albert Einstein explained how light waves travel by comparing them with ocean waves, something all of us can easily visualize in our mind’s eye.
How to explain things simply when speaking or writing
Break the subject down into its component parts. Start with the basics, and follow the advice of the man who said, “Start at the beginning, go to the end, and pass through the middle on the way.”
Get rid of your assumptions so you don’t forget the details
Those who talk at too high a level for their audience almost always skip pertinent details, too, assuming everybody knows that. Tech support people say you’d be surprised how often they have to ask callers if the machine is plugged in and turned on.
René (“I think, therefore I am.”) Descartes
René spoke French, so what he really said was “je pense, donc je suis.” Only later did he publish in Latin the famous “cogito, ergo sum.” Descartes believed that the better we understand science and mathematics, the better we can make decisions about the world we live in. He advocated breaking every problem down into the smallest parts you can and then solving the simplest problems first. You don’t put an entire meal in your mouth at once, do you?Most of us take one bite at a time.
Verybigbrain.com says geniuses all share the ability to dissect break enormous challenges into manageable parts
The Apollo 13 lunar mission went bad when a ruptured oxygen tank exploded, disabling the capsule’s life-support system. Teams of engineers each took on one of the many problems and solved it. By necessity, their solutions demanded that they use only materials available in the spacecraft. When all the teams put their work together, they solved the big problem and brought astronauts Lovell, Swigert, and Haise safely back to earth against enormous odds.
Long ago, the precocious child of two university professors child asked me what I do
I answered him as if he were an adult. I told him how I write about old things in new ways, look at the ordinary things in greater detail, and dig deeper into things we take for granted. He frowned for a few seconds, then brightened and said, “Oh, you write book reports.” It was such a brilliantly simple description that It became my stock answer.
The haunted house typeface is courtesy of BatesMeron
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The author is a researcher, writer, and teacher who looks at old things in new ways, sees the commonplace in greater detail, and explains complex subject matter in simple, conversational language. More than 400 of his free articles are posted on this site.
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