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The Curse of Knowledge: What It Is and How to Account for It
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The curse of knowledge
... is a cognitive bias that causes people to fail to account for the fact that others don’t know the same things that they do.
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Why we experience the curse of knowledge
Since we spend the majority of the time experiencing things from our own perspective, we struggle to imagine the perspective of others.
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for people to account for the fact that other people’s thoughts, beliefs, and views are different from their own.
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Minimize the curse of knowledge
You need to be conscious of the fact that people have different levels of knowledge than you.
- Ask for feedback from the people you are communicating with, in order to confirm that they understand what you are saying.
- Make sure that you explain the technical terms and concepts that you use as you are using it.
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Debiasing techniques
Use various debiasing techniques in order to help you account for the influence of the curse of knowledge.
- Visualize the perspective of the people that you are communicating with or use self-distancing language.
- You could also slow down your reasoning process and improve your decision-making environment, which will enable you to think in a clearer, less-biased manner.
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Being an expert
The curse of knowledge is about the difficulty in communication that people have when they know something that others don’t, and not just about the difficulty experts have.
This bias can play a role in any situation where one person recognizes something that other people don’t, and then account for it accordingly.
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Predicting other people’s behavior
Having an understanding of how the curse of knowledge affects people’s thinking can help you anticipate their behavior more accurately.
If you are aware that someone else is more knowledgeable in a certain field than others, you can take this into account when predicting how they will behave.
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Key Ideas
The bandwagon effect
It's a cognitive bias that causes people to think or act in a certain manner because they believe that other people are doing the same.
For example, the bandwagon effect might cause...
Examples of the bandwagon effect
- The bandwagon effect can influence people’s political choices.
- It can influence consumers’ decisions regarding which products to buy.
- It can influence users’ decisions regarding how to rate stories or comments.
- It can influence investors’ financial choices.
- It can influence doctors’ medical decisions.
- It can influence organizations’ implementation of new technologies.
Why the bandwagon effect happens
It serves as a mental shortcut that people instinctively use in order to make a decision quickly.
Specifically, bandwagon cues, which are signs that other people believe something or are doing something, can trigger the thought that “if other people like this, then I should too”.
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The egocentric bias
It is a cognitive bias that causes people to rely too much on their own point of view when they examine or remember events in their life.
This means that people tend to either underest...
Examples of the egocentric bias
- When you are giving a public talk, you assume that your nervousness is more apparent to others than is actually the case.
- You overestimate the amount of work that you contributed to a group project.
- You might believe that your colleagues all share your political beliefs and social values.
- You might remember yourself as having been the key player in a past event, despite the fact that you only played a relatively minor role in it.
What causes the egocentric bias
It occurs primarily due to the fact that we tend to naturally examine and remember events primarily through our personal point of view.
Even when we realize that we should adjust our perspective to see things through other people’s eyes, we tend to anchor this new perspective to our own, and we often fail to adjust from our original viewpoint enough to properly assess how other people feel.
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The Verbatim Effect
The verbatim effect is a cognitive bias that makes people remember the general outline and meaning of the information that is provided and not the exact, complete details.
Examp...
Why We Experience the Verbatim Effect
There are two main memory processes:
- Gist Memory concentrates on the core meaning of the information.
- Verbatim Memory focuses on the surface form or the easily visible part of the information.
The Gist Memory is encoded in a better way because it is an important part of the information, and is not apparent at first, making it desirable and thus easier to retain.
Variance in the Verbatim Effect
The Verbatim Effect varies in its influence on people and may or may not occur in situations, as it depends on several factors like:
- The individual's preferences, abilities, and experience.
- The type of information, along with the reason for interacting with the information. A meaningless piece of information will not have any verbatim effect on an individual.