Everyone who has studied at a school or university knows that sometimes it is completely impossible to understand something: despite the fact that the teacher seems to be well versed in the topic, all his attempts to explain something lead to nothing.
Fortunately, these situations are not the rule (otherwise we would never know anything), but rather the exception, which is often caused by a cognitive bias called the "curse of knowledge."
This phenomenon (in English it is called rather mystical 'the curse of knowledge') denotes a situation in which the speaker believes (most often erroneously) that the listener has all the information necessary for understanding. Why exactly a curse? Because a person with information, under the influence of this distortion, dooms himself to misunderstanding - both from other people and in relation to the communicative situation itself. In reality, a kind of vicious circle turns out: the listener does not understand what the speaker is trying to explain to him, while for the speaker the information he is trying to convey can be terribly elementary and logical, which is why he, in turn, does not understand why the listener does not understand it.
This phenomenon was first described in the late 1980s by American economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber. They, relying on works devoted to another cognitive distortion - the hindsight error (our readers, by the way, are very fond of remembering about it when they want to show that the results of the work are not as obvious as someone might think - thanks to them for that), described a market situation when a more informed participant cannot easily predict the behavior of a less informed participant. Because of this, the more knowledgeable is often the loser: he believes that his counterparty will act according to the information available to him. But this is where the "curse of knowledge" intervenes: the counterparty does not necessarily have the same amount of informationand therefore his decisions are not so easy to predict.
The most famous experiment demonstrating the "curse of knowledge" was conducted by Stanford University student Elizabeth Newton in 1990 while preparing her dissertation (unfortunately not published). The participants of her experiment were divided into two groups: the first pounded on the table, beating the rhythm of a simple melody, and the second listened to this knocking. The first group was asked to play something very simple (for example, the song 'Old McDonald had a farm'), and the members of the second group tried to guess these tunes. Before the experiment began, the knockers were also asked how many songs they thought the listeners would guess. The majority considered that at least half of the performed "compositions" should be guessed. In reality, listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of all tunes.
Newton (like all other researchers dealing with the "curse of knowledge"), in particular, showed that, knowing something, it is very difficult to imagine that someone might not have this information. The "melody" beat off on the table sounds to the performer quite similar to the original (for example, due to the fact that he repeats the rhythm in his head), but for the listener it may not be so obvious. Much of the matter, of course, comes down to execution: knowing something very well and being under the curse of knowledge, we are not too worried about how clearly we present the information to the listeners - largely because it seems obvious to us ourselves.
Our inability to realize that other people may not know or understand information that seems to us elementary, grows out of violations in the theory of mind - a model of mental representations responsible for building and processing judgments about ourselves and about other people. The tendency to "curse knowledge" is associated with a violation of the individual ability to empathy.
As a result, our ability to explain directly depends on our ability to perceive the state of another person. It turns out that the person “curses” not so much his knowledge itself (you, most likely, have met people in life who were able to explain something to you so that you understand), but the inability to realize that the interlocutor may think differently, and to be precise, not to know something that he himself knows.
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Author: Elizaveta Ivtushok