“What? You didn’t know that?” This reaction is a symptom of the “Curse of Knowledge,” a cognitive bias where experts assume their specific knowledge is common sense.
Whether you are an improviser, a financial expert, or a doctor, you likely overestimate how obvious your ideas are to others. For example, doctors often overestimate how much their patients understand by 20 to 30 percent. Linguist Steven Pinker notes that this bias causes academics to write poorly, relying on jargon rather than concrete details. To fix this in your content, you must consciously remove assumptions and replace abstract explanations with specific stories.
In this micro-episode:
- Why experts consistently overestimate their audience’s baseline knowledge
- Steven Pinker’s theory on why academics struggle to write clearly
- How to use concrete examples to bypass the “Curse of Expertise”
Resources:
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/management/curse-of-knowledge
Physicians: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0738399106003466
Pinker: https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_2014_why_academics_writing_stinks.pdf
Find more episodes and subscribe at stereoforest.com/minute.
Transcript
WEBVTT
::The Curse of Knowledge
::That's a cognitive bias that so many of us have felt
::that goes a little bit like,
::what? You didn't know that?
::We assume that everyone knew whatever that thing was.
::We assume that there's way more common knowledge out there
::than there actually is.
::It has a name or two.
::It's called the Curse of Knowledge or the Curse of Expertise.
::If you've done a hobby, and you're like really immersed in that community around this hobby, and
eventually many of us then think that everyone has so much more knowledge about that thing. Like for me,
improv comedy. I got into improv comedy, and after a good while, I thought that the average person knew way
more about it than they actually do. In reality, most people might maybe know that there was that show,
::that time that did that improv stuff. Whose line is it? Yeah, that show, right? But after you do improv for a
while, you're gonna forget that it's just a you thing. And that's a pretty common experience regardless of
what hobbies and activities we get into. And for you, it's probably not improv. People who have very
specialized information from improvisers to financial experts to doctors,
::They regularly overestimate how obvious or clear their ideas or strategies are to others. A 20-fold
overestimate is very common in this particular cognitive bias. We really live in our heads when it comes to
these things that we think about all the time. For example, medical doctors overestimate how much their
patients understand by 20 to 30 percent. And this is for no other reason than difficult
::I've had to remind myself this regularly when working in the tech space as an educator and as a freelancer.
Steven Pinker, who's a linguist, observes that academians tend to write poorly because they assume their
knowledge is common. And as a result, writers use jargon and they fail to provide the concrete details that
readers need to know in order to visualize or understand these concepts.
::concepts. I'll link to that in the show notes. So if we're putting together our learning and our ideas
online to an audience, we have to make sure that we do those reality checks first. And that's just to make
sure that we remove the assumptions. We don't need to actually change what we're saying. So you can test
your content if that's available to you. Give concrete examples instead of those abstract explanations
and specific stories
::are a lot more effective than general principles. And this happens because concrete specifics, they
provide that context, that expertise kind of took out of our mental space. So recognize your knowledge,
remove those assumptions. That's a really good step towards solving this in our episodes. I'm Jen DeHaan.
This is the Credibility Minute. You can find more episodes and get in touch with me at stereoforest.com/minute.