The Curse of Knowledge

A friend recommended the book - ‘Made To Stick’ by Chip and Dan Heath. I have just started reading it. It’s about how some ideas take hold and become sticky while others come unstuck.

An interesting piece from the book was about the curse of knowledge. The authors talk about the game of tappers and listeners, conducted in 1990 by Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist at Stanford. She plays this game with a group of people, and divides people into one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners”.

Tappers get a list of 25 well-known songs like “Happy Birthday to You”. Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm by knocking the table for the listener. The listener was asked to guess the song. 120 songs were tapped out and only 3 were guessed correctly.

The interesting part - Before the game started, Elizabeth asked the tappers to predict the odds of listeners guessing the song correctly. They predicted that the odds would be around 50 percent.

Predicted: 1 time in 2

Actual: 1 time in 40

Why?

Even the tappers wanted to know. They were shocked by the performance of the listeners.

The authors explain that the tappers have been given knowledge of the song title which makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, it makes it impossible to imagine what it must be like for the listeners to hear the taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge.

The tappers and listeners experiment is what we see daily worldwide - teachers and students, CEOs and employees, marketers and customers. Chip and Dan mentioned that there are only two ways to beat the curse of knowledge. The first is not to learn anything. The other, and what the book focuses on, is to take your knowledge and transform it into a clear and understandable way for others. This is the key to making your ideas "sticky" - memorable and easy to grasp.

So, the tappers and listeners represent any communication gap, and the book offers strategies to bridge that gap and get your message across effectively.

I wrote this along with other personal writing pieces in my Substack newsletter. You can read it here :)