Break the Curse of Knowledge

I was well into my 30s before I learned that elbow grease is, in fact, just a metaphor and not a type of product. I don't know where I picked up that idea, but any time I drove my car through a car wash, I wondered whether it was hosing down my car with any elbow grease somewhere in between the soap and the wax. Only when someone said, "Abbey, elbow grease means hard work. It's not an actual thing" that, suddenly, many conversations made much more sense in hindsight.

We all have a story like that one. It is a great conversation starter because the experience is so universal: "What's one thing you learned in life much later than everyone else around you?" People's faces light up as they share some piece of knowledge they didn't pick up on until well after most other people. Inevitably, individuals chime in with variations of the same response: "How could you not know that?"

When humans learn something new, not only does it quickly become a part of our internalized body of knowledge, but we forget what it was like to not know it. We lose empathy for people who don't know it, and we cannot comprehend how they got so far in life without it.

That phenomenon is called the Curse of Knowledge. It hampers communication, muddies the knowledge that subject matter experts try to impart to others, and is poison to onboarding. Thankfully, we can break the curse.

Falling victim to the curse

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton conducted research for her graduate degree at Stanford University where she demonstrated the Curse of Knowledge. She paired study participants into tappers and listeners and then instructed each tapper to tap the rhythm of a song with their fingers on the table while their listener partner tried to guess the song. Tappers chose from among 40 popular songs, such as "Happy Birthday" or "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Newton asked the tappers to estimate how many songs their partner would guess correctly. On average, the tappers predicted that the guessers would correctly name half the songs. In reality, the guessers only got about one in 40 correct.

Newton's study demonstrates that even though a song is obvious to the person who knows which one it is, to someone who doesn't, it's just tapping noise. That is the Curse of Knowledge.

So, what's going on in the brain when that happens? It's important to remember how humans perceive new information. Our senses relay everything to the brain, which interprets the element and decides what it is that we're seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing.

Any game of charades or Pictionary demonstrates that process in practice. Consider the latter: Someone draws a bunch of squiggly lines that you cannot work out until they tell you what it is. At that moment, the lines make sense. The picture hasn't changed, but what you know about it has. Your brain is now reinterpreting the input. You immediately lose the ability to see the picture as you did before because you now have knowledge about it.

That is, in essence, what happens every time someone learns something. They add the knowledge to their schema, and it instantly connects with other relevant points of data in their brain.

As an exercise, as you're reading this, try to forget something you already know. Can you picture how you would go about cooking a meal in your home if you didn't know how to turn on the stove? That piece of information becomes so embedded that we forget that there are people who don't know how to turn on a stove.

The curse at work

Let's explore some of the ways the Curse of Knowledge can cause problems in the workplace.

Lack of empathy for novices. When a new employee goes through onboarding, they receive training and on-the-job tasks to check and make sure they have all the knowledge they need to fulfill their role. All too often, however, a manager will assume a new employee already knows something and will leave it out of the onboarding experience.

For instance, a manager for an energy company may have a new hire who doesn't know how to perform a gas leak check. Because the process is second nature to them due to executing it for many years, they may be surprised that their new hire doesn't have the same know-how. As another example, an inventory manager in a warehouse who can calculate inventory turns in their head may shake their head wondering why a new employee is struggling with "something so simple."

In such scenarios, the manager has forgotten what it's like to be a beginner and, therefore, neglects to impart crucial knowledge to the new hire.

Overly complex training. Subject matter experts are a wealth of knowledge on a topic but often don't recall what it was like to be a beginner. As a result, SMEs often think they're starting at a basic level but aren't doing so simply enough, causing learners to quickly get lost.

Poor internal and external customer service. Let's say I need help figuring out how to log on to the learning management system, a platform I use only once or twice a year. I contact someone to help me recover my password, and they sigh and reluctantly walk me through the steps. They use the LMS every day, so to them, logging on is no problem. But as someone who rarely uses it, I don't have that same familiarity.

Anyone who has ever had a support representative become impatient while explaining something that is completely new but obvious to them has fallen victim to the Curse of Knowledge in a customer service setting.

Communication misfires. There are two big dangers here. The first involves individuals not simplifying topics to the most rudimentary levels. For example, have you ever sent an email with a schedule, plan, or series of steps, and you subsequently get "?" as a response? Although the flow of everything made sense to you when you sent it, it wasn't apparent to the person on the receiving end.

The other danger is perception of tone. Let's say someone sends me an email or chat message that says, "Do you want me to join your meeting at 3?" I reply with "That's up to you." To me, that reply is perfectly cordial and good-natured. It's obvious to me that I'm leaving the decision up to them, and that I trust their choice. However, how are they reading my reply? Are they perceiving it as cordial or hostile?

People get caught in the Curse of Knowledge when they read their own communications and cannot fathom how someone may read it differently than they intended.

Loss of learner-centered design. The Curse of Knowledge damages empathy, and empathy is the lifeblood of design when it comes to making good learning experiences.

Picture the age-old, poorly designed e-learning format with slide after slide of text with narration. The SME is reading a large amount of information out loud to the learner and expecting them to remember it after having seen it once. It's easy to imagine the SME reviewing the text on each slide and thinking, "This makes perfect sense to me. I'm reading it over once and I have no problem recalling the information, so this should be good."

The SME has forgotten what it's like to read the information for the first time and has created a learning experience that isn't a learning experience at all—it's a terms-and-conditions audiobook.

The Curse of Knowledge is the biggest barrier to learner-centered design. L&D practitioners assume what the learners already know, not just regarding the skills and abilities necessary for their role, but also in terms of which button does what on a user interface. That mindset can make work-step documentation hard for learners to follow because the writer assumed that it was OK to be implicit rather than explicit about details associated with a particular step. So, when a learner gets confused, designers assume the problem must lie with learners, not themselves.

Breaking the curse

Now that you understand the various ways the curse can creep into L&D work, what can practitioners do about it?

Have awareness. Like many psychological phenomena, awareness is the first step. Knowing that the phenomenon exists can help you spot it, and spotting it can help you address it.

Beware the word "should." Should shows up a lot when the Curse of Knowledge is present: "They should know this." "They should be familiar with the prerequisite knowledge." "This puzzle should be easy for most people to solve."

But ask yourself: Should it? What are you assuming? Have you checked to make sure your learners do know that?

Have multiple people audit and proofread. Once you write a draft of any content, show it to someone else so they can check your work. There's a reason for the phrase "fresh pair of eyes"—someone new hasn't stared at it so long that the words bleed together.

Incidentally, that ties into the idea that the brain, rather than the eyes, decides what someone sees. For example, if you expect text to have correct spelling, your brain may gloss over any misspellings because you weren't actively looking for them. A new proofreader will not have that same handicap. The more perspectives you get during a review phase, the better, because diverse perspectives always spot things that your perspective won't.

Playtest, playtest, playtest. If you design riddles or games for learning experiences, test them with multiple people. People who design escape games can explain how the Curse of Knowledge can get in the way of accurately estimating how long it will take a learner to complete a particular puzzle or whether the solution is too obvious or not obvious enough. They playtest extensively to see how most people react to the puzzle.

Break steps into chunks. A friend of mine learned how to drive a car later than her peers, and when her father sat her behind the wheel, he told her, "Start the car." She then asked, "How do I do that?" He repeated himself: "Just start the car." She explained again that she didn't know how.

The problem was that her father thought of starting the car as one step, but she needed him to further break it down: Put the key here, turn it this far, wait until you hear the engine turn over, and then turn the key partway back.

Review steps that you're writing or demonstrating. Are there any that you have assumed are obviously one big step? Can you break them into smaller steps for the learner? Chunk them as much as possible.

Avoid the phrase "This is easy." You may think the expression is helpful to say to an anxious learner, but what if you tell a learner, "This next part is easy"—and then it isn't for them? How do you imagine they will feel about their ability?

Instead, make observable comments, such as "The last process we did was 10 steps; this next part is only three." That statement is objectively true and will help ease a learner's anxiety.

Learning lessons

Whenever I tell someone that I thought elbow grease was a product, they often say something such as "How could you not know that?" I always have the same response: "Nobody ever told me."

If a learner doesn't know something, it's simply because no one has ever told them. It is not learning designers' responsibility to hold a learner's lack of knowledge against the individual. But it is our responsibility to help them learn.

Play It Safe With the Swiss Cheese Model

The risk management industry uses the Swiss Cheese Model to ensure safety. Picture slices of Swiss cheese stacked on top of each other. If you stack two slices, you will block some of the holes but others will line up, allowing things to slip through. The more layers you stack, the less chance that any holes will line up all the way through the block of cheese.

Think of safety planning for a delivery truck. There's a regular inspection—that's one layer of Swiss cheese. The driver completes a visual inspection each morning—that's another layer. The more layers in the process, the less chance an accident will slip through.

Learning designers can use the same logic with any content they write or create. Have numerous people proofread it, because the more individuals you show it to, the more layers of cheese you're adding. That means there will be a lower likelihood that the Curse of Knowledge will make it all the way to the end and allow errors to slip past you and the others checking your work.