Have you ever had a teacher who was very smart, but also terrible at actual teaching? An expert who
used so much jargon you could not quite follow their explanation? This is called the “curse of
knowledge”, a term coined by economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber.
It’s a cognitive bias that occurs when someone incorrectly assumes that the others have enough
background to understand. For example, that smart professor of yours might no longer remember the
challenges a young student faces when learning a new subject.
The curse of knowledge makes it really hard to accurately reconstruct our own’s previous, less
knowledgeable state of mind in which we did not know or understand something. In effect,
we have a strong tendency to unknowingly assume that others know what we know or that it would
be easier to learn it than it actually is.
One of the most famous illustrations of the curse of knowledge is an experiment which
was conducted at Stanford by a graduate student named Elizabeth Newton. In this study,
she asked a group of participants to “tap out” famous songs
with their fingers, while another group tried to name the melodies.
When the “tappers” were asked to predict how many of the songs would be recognised by the listeners,
they would always overestimate. The “tappers” were so familiar with what they were tapping,
they assumed listeners would easily recognised the melody.
In increasing complex, rapidly changing Information Age, the ability to transfer one’s
knowledge is extremely important. The curse of knowledge, thus, presents a thorny problem
to our modern civilization.
The teacher, who already possesses the knowledge, as we saw, is often not able to convey the
knowledge in a way suited for those who do not possess it already. And in the business world,
managers and employees, marketers and customers, corporate headquarters and the front line,
all rely on ongoing communication but suffer from enormous information imbalances.