Curse of Knowledge

The more you know, the easier it becomes to lose your audience.

We have this amazing ability to hear what we think we are saying and find it very hard to distinguish between our inner dialogue and what the audience is actually hearing.

This is only made worse when you are a subject matter expert, and the audience is not, but we have long since forgotten what it is like to be on the receiving end of all of this new information. Here, we can quickly lose and confuse the audience, which is never a good outcome.

Tappers or Listeners?

Elizabeth Newton earned a PhD in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: "tappers" or "listeners."

Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as "Happy Birthday" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep”. I know you can’t stop hearing it now!

Each tapper was asked to tap out the rhythm to a listener by knocking on a table with a couple of pens. The listener's job was to guess the song based on the tapped rhythm.

Here's what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the song's name, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 per cent.

In reality, the tappers got their message across 1 in 40 times, but they thought they were getting it across 1 time in 2. Why?

It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can't hear that tune—all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a bizarre Morse Code.

At the end of the experiment, the tappers are astonished at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Clearly, this is Baa Baa Black Sheep, they think.

The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title), which makes it impossible to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge.

The Curse of Knowledge

This has become known as the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. It becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others because we can't readily recreate our listeners' state of mind.

The more you know, the harder it is to ‘feel’ what it is like to hear this for the first time, to put yourself in your audience's shoes. You can have the most important message or idea, but how that shows up and connects with the audience, how you structure your narrative and content to enable them to connect and follow along, matters more than the message itself.

Sometimes, the only way to ensure that Baa Baa Black Sheep isn’t interpreted as Bohemian Rapsody is to get an outside perspective. This will help sharpen the delivery and ensure that every point lands as intended.