The good ol’ curse of knowledge — it’s my jam. Apart from my own lack of discipline in blogging, I would like to blame my favourite cognitive bias from preventing me to write as much as I would like to. This is my third attempt in the past one hour of writing something, after discarding two half-written drafts, only to realize mid-way both times that whatever I was writing might not be valuable enough for others to read. Or so I think. All this meandering courtesy of the curse of knowledge. But now it is big brain time; time to outwit the bias by blogging about the bias.
What does it mean?
A popular example for understanding the curse of knowledge is the ‘tapping study’ conducted at Stanford in the 90s. Participants of the study were divided into two groups: tappers who finger-tapped well known songs, and listeners who had to guess the song observing the taps. In one part of the study, the tappers were asked to guess the number of times the listeners would be able to identify the songs. The tappers estimated an average probability of identification of songs as 50%, when in fact the listener group was able to identify the songs in a staggeringly low number of 2.5% of the cases.
Kinda-related fun video as a similar experiment: Jimmy Fallon and Keanu Reeves in The Whisper Challenge.
I have a simpler, personal example. My mom is a great cook. This could partly be my partiality talking, but to put my case objectively, she has the gifts of taste as well as efficiency. She can probably recreate an hour long recipe in 30 minutes, without compromising on the taste. However, whenever I ask her for instructions for cooking dumaloo, halwa, or even pulao — let me just say that I rather refer to Kabita’s Kitchen instead of my mom’s abstract guidance. But if she’s so great at cooking she should exactly know the measurements and be able to easily instruct someone else to recreate the recipe, right? Say hello to the curse of knowledge.
The cognitive bias called the ‘curse of knowledge’ is when our brain assumes that whatever we know is in fact common knowledge. When we know about something, we tend to think of it as obvious, and just assume that it is such basic information that everyone must know it already.
This is what is probably preventing my mother to explain the steps clearly — because cooking is basic knowledge to her. She has practiced her craft over years and cooks with intuition. So to lay out each and every step, the sequence of which might be crucial to how the dish turns out, is so basic to her that she might even forget some in between. Of course everyone knows when to add the tomatoes and when to add the garam masala, right? And now you know why those 10s of half-written blogs ranging from ‘the price of freedom’, ‘the luxury of choice’, and ‘is creativity a privilege’ are just hanging in my drafts section. In the tapping experiment, the tappers already know which song they are tapping, and the tapping pattern seems obvious enough for them — of course this pattern is this song, what else could it be? Meanwhile the listener is struggling to understand, heavily clueless. The pre-knowledge of the tapper creates this gap of mismatched results between them and the listener.
It is quite useful to understand how this bias might be impacting the significant decisions you take and how it might be shaping your personality. And the ways in which it manifests has quite a range — from low stakes event of you not blogging regularly to high stakes situation of you coming off as an unlikeable personality.
Why should you care?
I find myself dealing with this bias quite often and each time have to fight it consciously, but with variable success. I care about it because it has more repercussions for me as I tend towards the introvert side of the spectrum. The fact that I write heavily based on my personal experiences appears to me a precarious position to be in. As I keep typing and get deeper into unpacking my experiences, it starts to appear very familiar. The realization of how common this “personal” occurrence must be, privy to everyone else, starts slowing down my typing speed. Why is this blog interesting to anyone, what value is this obvious observation of mine adding to the universe? And with that, the fate of these half-written blogs is sealed by my curse of knowledge. This bias is a hindrance to an activity that I otherwise thoroughly enjoy. Moreover, doesn’t everyone write / communicate from their personal experiences, what other way is there? My brain assuming something to be common knowledge doesn’t make it so. Sure, the people who read the blogs will have similar human experiences. But that can be in fact a good thing. It could be comforting, provide perspective, be relatable, or be helpful to someone. And it doesn’t have to be this way anyway, that isn’t even why I started blogging. It is defeating my own set purpose and logic.
Clear communication is hard. The way you write, make a film, argue with your partner, deliver presentations at work, write an email — there is always a valley between what the communicator knows and assumes and what the receiver actually knows and interprets. The inevitable adulteration in the process of transforming your thoughts into a form expected to make others understand you adequately is aggravated by the knowledge curse.
In your workplace, instances such as putting forth your ideas in a meeting, strategizing with your team as a leader, and dealing with a clients run the risk of you being ineffective at materializing your thoughts. You know your opinions in and out, but your teammates don’t know the history of how your thought process evolved. You could start pitching your product / service at level 2, where as the customer isn’t even familiar with level 1. Imagine how hard it is being a teacher, when you know quite a lot as compared to your students, and you have to explain brand new concepts in a way that every student is able to grasp it optimally, but also without you appearing condescending.
The curse of knowledge is preventing you to take initiative, and even when you take the plunge, rendering your communication suboptimal. And we know what they say about good communication — “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough”.
How do you reverse the curse?
Misjudging the intellect levels of your audience involves you either over- or under-estimating their knowledge levels regarding the topic at hand. Depending on how you handle this bias, it could hold you back, induce reticence or make you appear unlikeable and condescending. In any case, you’ll probably be better if you try overcoming it. With due cognizance of the Dunning-Kruger effect of course!
My favourite approach of making decisions when in doubt is going the Stoic way. Imagine the worst possible scenario that could occur if the thing you’re conflicted about actually happens. Starting from a personal level, try to objectively assess if the thing you’re thinking of as common knowledge is really that common. The worst that can happen if you write about something already well-known is that not many will read it. Unless you’re a business relying on audience response for revenue, I don’t think this should keep you from expressing yourself. Someone will find some type of value (novelty, relatability etc.) in your seemingly banal experience. Now imagine yourself in a social setting, where you find yourself in a circle of people discussing a topic. What is the worse that can happen, even if you “state the obvious”? I’ll tell you what, people will just nod in agreement and move on to add to what you said, and the talk will continue! No one is going to stop the conversation to think — oh what an obvious point to say out loud. Think about any other possible scenarios that you imagine could occur, and decide if they are so bad after all. There is always going to be a gap between the knowledge of two people as their perception of the world is unique to them. This should not prevent them from communicating! While convincing me to join twitter, my brother often countered my argument of “what revolutionarily different ideas to what is already out there am I going to bring anyway” by saying that it doesn’t have to be a different or completely new idea, it’s just your personal take on things, which is inherently unique to you. (Here’s a great article he wrote about how to use Twitter as a learning tool)
Now coming to the the scenario when you have overcome the inhibition and taken initiative to communicate. In this case, you need to tactfully juggle between not assuming that the audience knows everything and that they know nothing. A good starting point is to predetermine a reasonable intellectual level of your audience based on some background info of the group. Throughout the course of your interaction you need to be empathetic and adjust the way you communicate depending on how well you’re able to assess their knowledge levels. For such an assessment you might have to lay down some basic ground rules and get rid of all the obvious but necessary talk right in the beginning. It’s best to stick to keeping your communication as uncomplicated as possible. That’s why good teaching sessions and presentations are always interactive. In fact that is what makes them good in the first place, because the presenter is constantly in touch with how much the audience is able to follow their ideas, and hence are able to modulate their expression effectively.
The key is to be cautiously confident, involved, empathetic and sincere.
I cannot tell you how much I had to struggle to get to this level of the blog — constantly fighting my own curse of knowledge while writing about the curse of knowledge! For example, the song-tapping study that I used to explain this phenomenon — it’s obviously not mine, and it is a very widely cited study. I wrote it based on what I read somewhere, because I thought it might be relevant to someone wanting to understand the bias. There is plenty of information available on all the cognitive biases, I am not inventing something new here. It’s easy to assume that since it is a common example, mentioning it here again makes it redundant. But making the assumption that all the readers will already know of it is going too far; do let me know if you were in fact already familiar with this study!
Let’s suppose some reader already knows what this bias is all about. They will probably skim or skip that section and move to the next part. Or might not even click on the blog. Is the fear of triteness and irrelevance justified in my attempt to inculcate discipline and overcome my own knowledge curse? I don’t think so!
Where else will you get abruptly ending blogs? Only here :)