## **Summary: Curse of Knowledge** ##### **Definition:** • A cognitive bias where experts assume others share their specialised knowledge, leading to poor [[Communication]] or understanding. ##### **Examples:** ###### • **[[Education]]:** Teachers may struggle to empathise with students’ difficulties in learning new concepts. ###### • **Everyday Scenarios:** • Tappers overestimating listeners’ ability to recognise melodies in a song-tapping experiment. • Actors in charades believing their gestures are clearer than they are. ##### **History:** • Coined in 1989 by economists Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber in studies on information asymmetry. • Inspired by Baruch Fischhoff’s 1975 work on hindsight bias, showing people struggle to recall their prior, less-informed states of mind. ### **Economic Implications:** • Better-informed agents may fail to exploit their knowledge advantage in negotiations. • **Example:** In bargaining, informed parties offer more than necessary due to their inability to ignore knowledge of the stakes. ### **Applications:** • **Marketing:** Over-informed agents may undersell products by failing to empathise with less-informed buyers. • **Education:** Teachers must predict learners’ challenges rather than rely on their own perspective. • Solutions: Quality assurance, peer review, and techniques like _Decoding the Disciplines_ bridge the gap between expert and novice [[Thinking]]. • **Computer Programming:** Programmers often create unintuitive code or interfaces because they assume users share their knowledge. ### **Experimental Evidence:** • Studies show that familiarity with an outcome or concept skews reasoning and perspective-taking, although some findings (e.g., plausibility effects) have been challenged by later research. ### **Implications in Professions:** • **Academia:** Peer reviews address the bias by involving external, qualified evaluators. • **Design:** User experience experts remind software developers, “You are not the user.” • **Professional Licences:** Ongoing training and quality control mitigate expertise [[Biases]]. ##### **Cultural References:** • Fictional example: Dr. Watson’s confusion over Sherlock Holmes’ deductions illustrates the gap between expert and novice understanding. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`