Minimize the curse of knowledge

• 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.

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”.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.