Summary
An insight from Zhi Fou opens an exploration of why expertise can hide a beginner's difficulties—and how audience checks, layered explanations and novice feedback may help.
At a glance
The curse of knowledge is the difficulty of imagining what someone without your information understands, which can lead you to overestimate their knowledge. Familiarity and automatic recall may make missing explanatory steps harder to notice. Checking what an audience knows, introducing complexity in layers and gathering feedback from beginners are approaches that may help; perspective-taking alone did not significantly improve prediction accuracy in the experiment described.
When a beginner notices what experience overlooks
In the Chinese television drama Zhi Fou, the Sheng family reaches an impasse over Shulan's marriage. The disreputable Scholar Sun has paid for one document involved in the purchase of an enslaved person, the shenqi, but overlooked another, the jiqi. Minglan, who has only recently begun learning to manage a household, spots this omission and uses it to turn the situation around.
The puzzling part is that the family's elders do not immediately think of it. They have handled many such transactions. Compared with Minglan, a newcomer to household management, they have considerable practical experience. How could they miss something so important?
Some viewers dismiss the scene as favoritism toward the protagonist. Yet beginners noticing something experienced people miss is a familiar pattern beyond television. The scene illustrates what psychologists call the curse of knowledge: once we know something, it becomes difficult to imagine the mental world of someone who does not. “I know this” quietly becomes “surely you know this too.”
If you have memorized your multiplication facts, for instance, it can be hard to imagine someone unable to use them. How could they possibly not know?
This difficulty reaches into education, research communication and business. Knowing more does not necessarily make us better at recognizing what other people know.
Why expertise can make understanding others harder
In research, the curse of knowledge describes the difficulty people with an informational advantage have in accurately predicting the understanding of people without that information. They tend to overestimate what others know.
That is what makes the drama's example revealing. To the elders, the two documents are basic knowledge in transactions involving enslaved people. Sun's scholarly status also places him above Shulan's merchant family in the social hierarchy of the time. They see little reason to suspect that someone of his standing might not understand something so elementary.
Minglan approaches the situation differently. These supposedly obvious facts are still new knowledge, recently learned through household management. Minglan remembers how easily the distinction could be overlooked. Sun, meanwhile, earned his scholarly qualification young but has spent the following ten years drinking, carousing and neglecting his studies. Minglan wagers that he does not know the significance of the second document.
The elders' experience encourages an assumption. Minglan's recent learning leaves room for a possibility they fail to consider.
I recognize the same problem from our everyday work writing and editing popular-science articles. A writer sets out to explain a psychological phenomenon using specialist knowledge so that general readers can understand why it happens. The intention is clear; the finished article is not. The prose is stiff, the terminology dense, and readers struggle to get through it, let alone grasp the explanation.
When the editor returns suggestions, the writer feels misunderstood: “I've worked so hard to explain this. Why does it still sound like an expert talking over everyone's head? Why is making a complex idea accessible so difficult?”
The curse can take hold without anyone noticing.
What happens as people learn more
A research program involving four experiments examined this problem. In the central procedure, participants learned answers to trivia questions and then estimated the probability that untrained observers—novices—would answer those questions correctly. The account then describes three rounds of repetition, with participants learning again and making fresh estimates in each round.
The researchers measured two different abilities:
- Calibration: the discrepancy between participants' predicted success rates and novices' actual success rates.
- Resolution: the ability to distinguish relatively easy questions from relatively difficult ones.
As participants learned more, their predictions of novice performance became less accurate. The tendency to overestimate other people's knowledge was particularly pronounced in the third round.
Their ability to distinguish easy questions from hard ones also deteriorated. After acquiring the knowledge, participants' accuracy in judging question difficulty was reported to fall by 34%.
One likely explanation is that people rely too heavily on their own experience: how quickly an answer comes to mind, or how familiar the information feels. Those cues are available to the knowledgeable person, but they do not describe the novice's experience.
The researchers also tried an intervention intended to reduce reliance on personal knowledge, including asking participants to focus more on the other person's perspective when answering. In that experiment, the intervention did not significantly improve prediction accuracy. Simply trying to put yourself in someone else's position may not be enough to reconstruct what it feels like not to know.
The classroom and the marketplace
In education, the curse of knowledge can create a double difficulty. Teachers may treat material they have already explained as material students already understand. Meanwhile, students who have mastered that material can lose sensitivity to its difficulty for others. Research discussed in this context reported a 21% decline in students' ability to discriminate question difficulty after learning the material. “I can do it” becomes “everyone can do it.”
Perhaps you remember a teacher asking whether a problem needed another explanation. Someone confidently called out, “No!” And the teacher moved on—taking everyone else along, ready or not.
The same problem may add hidden costs to business communication.
In an experiment by Camerer and colleagues, researchers created a market situation with unequal access to information. One group had actual company earnings data; the other had to make predictions using public reports. When the informed group predicted the less-informed group's judgments, the reported deviation reached as much as 47%.
Product design offers another example. A survey study found that users of dashboards created by data scientists took several times longer than expected to identify key information. You may recognize the experience of using a product whose design seems unable to tell you how it is supposed to work.
When specialists cannot step back from what they know and explain things at a beginner's level, their expertise becomes difficult for others to use.
Why the missing steps disappear
Reliance on personal familiarity is one possible explanation. Another concerns how established knowledge is retrieved.
Neuroscience research cited in this discussion describes knowledge retrieval as becoming highly automatic once an expert has developed a knowledge network. In that account, the prefrontal cortex suppresses renewed processing of foundational information after knowledge has been integrated.
Consider 7 × 8. If you know your multiplication facts, 56 probably appears almost immediately. You do not reconstruct the answer by adding seven eight times.
That shortcut is useful when calculating. When explaining, however, it can make the intermediate steps harder to notice. It may also help explain why, after learning a discipline's terminology, people return to everyday conversation speaking in specialist language and struggle to find ordinary words for what they mean.
Our brains seem to deserve at least some of the blame. But what might help us work around the problem?
Make the knowledge gap visible
One possible approach is metacognitive monitoring: paying attention to our own thinking and explicitly recognizing the difference between what we know and what our audience knows.
Before explaining something, an expert can write down five questions the audience might have. Putting the questions on paper makes the task more concrete than assuming the audience's needs are already obvious.
In teaching, this means finding out what students currently understand, comparing it with the curriculum's requirements, and identifying the gaps that need focused explanation. Ordinary tests serve this purpose too: they help teachers see what students have learned and where further teaching is needed.
The point is to establish the gap rather than infer its absence from your own familiarity.
Let explanations unfold in layers
Another approach is to introduce complexity progressively. Information can be organized into a core layer, an expanded layer and a layer of detail.
In popular-science writing, that might mean introducing a technical term, explaining what it means, and then giving an everyday example. Each stage gives the reader something to build on before the explanation becomes more demanding.
Research cited in support of this approach reports that layered presentation can significantly improve information uptake. The structure gives readers a route into material that might otherwise arrive as an undifferentiated mass of terminology and detail.
Bring beginners into the conversation
The most direct way to discover what a nonspecialist does not understand is to let a nonspecialist respond.
After drafting an article about a specialist subject, give it to someone outside that field. Their reading can quickly reveal the opaque passages. Revise those passages into language they can understand. This process can substantially improve readability and make the article accessible to a broader audience.
Product design can make this calibration more systematic through ongoing feedback. Eye tracking, for example, can visualize the path a user's attention takes while looking through a chart.
This is a central reason technology companies employ user researchers. By continually collecting and analyzing evidence about how users perceive and navigate information, they can identify points of difficulty in a design and help avoid the curse of knowledge that expert-led design can introduce.
Build a passage between knowing and not knowing
From Minglan's insight to modern cognitive research, the curse of knowledge raises a question about what expertise is for. Perhaps genuine expertise depends as much on the ability to create two-way understanding as on the amount of knowledge accumulated.
Plato's allegory of the cave explores the limits of what people can perceive and understand. In our own age of increasingly fine professional specialization, perhaps we need to remain alert to those limits too. More barriers between different worlds of knowledge will not carry civilization forward. Building bridges between them is what can keep our shared vessel moving.
Frequently asked questions
Does the curse of knowledge mean experts lose their knowledge?
The difficulty concerns judging what other people know. Familiar information can make experts overestimate a beginner's understanding or overlook the steps an explanation needs.
Is perspective-taking enough to overcome the curse of knowledge?
In the experiment described, asking participants to focus more on another person's perspective did not significantly improve prediction accuracy. That finding does not establish that all perspective-taking or all interventions are ineffective.
How can explanations become more accessible to beginners?
The article suggests checking the audience's current understanding, introducing complexity progressively and asking someone outside the specialty to identify unclear passages. These are approaches that may help, rather than guaranteed solutions.
