Tappers, Listeners and the Curse of Knowledge!

In a recent workshop that I conducted, I spoke about “tappers and listeners.”

A random volunteer was picked up. I took him aside and told him some popular songs, like ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Happy Birthday’. He then had to tap the song on a table, which I requested the other participants to guess.

The volunteer tapped the first song on the table.

Guess what? The ‘listener’ participants got it correct.

Then the second song – wrong guess! Third song – wrong guess again!

I thought the tapping was so incredibly close to the tune of the original song. But not the others. Wrong guesses again and again.

For every wrong guess, the tapper was wondering what was wrong with the audience! How could they just not guess a song as simple as Happy Birthday to you – tapped with such incredible precision!

This established one thing: The tapper was playing the popular song in his head as he tapped. Meanwhile, the listeners can't hear that tune —all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.

Tappers have prior knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. They can't imagine that for the listeners it was isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge.

It may sound counterintuitive but it is this Curse of Knowledge that prevents us from effective communication. When a CEO discusses "unlocking shareholder value," there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can't hear. I guess George Bernard Shaw had figured it out much earlier when he said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”

There are numerous such examples in everyday life. Can you think of any?

(This demonstration was an adaptation of a psychological experiment performed in 1990 by Elizabeth Newton at Stanford. Over the course of Newton's experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120.

Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. You know what, they predicted that the odds were 50 percent!

In reality, the tappers got their message across just 1 time in 40, but they THOUGHT they were getting their message across 1 time in 2.

Curse of Knowledge!

I read about this in a book written by Chip & Dan Heath.)