THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

THERE is a famous experiment from the 1980s, in the field of behavioural psychology and child development designed by Juergen Hogrefe, Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner called the ‘Deceptive Box Task’ or ‘Smarties Task’ that arrives at interesting conclusions about the stage of development of a child’s cognition (reasoning). In the experiment, a subject, typically a three-year-old child is given a box of Smarties (the popular British candy-coated chocolate snack, also known as the poor man’s M&Ms) and asked to open the box to reveal its contents. Typically, the child will not wait for a second invitation; they tear through the packaging zealously, mouth watering profusely. As you’ve probably already guessed, this doesn’t end all that well. It turns out that it is not a box of Smarties as much as it is a box of crayons.

The child is often dumb-founded by the discovery and it takes a lot of effort on their part to hold back tears of disappointment. The experimenter, typically a (mean) psychologist, is then called to practise some finesse to calm the poor thing.
The key objective of the experiment is achieved after a question is posed to the three-year-old: “If we asked a child outside, what would they think is in the box?” The underdeveloped mind responds; “They’ll know that the box has crayons not Smarties in it.” The disappointed child fails to ‘un-know’ (so to speak) the truth about the box of crayons and projects their knowledge onto the next subject, forgetting that they, at first, thought the contents of the box of Smarties were way more delicious than how it played out in the end. The failure to predict another individual’s lack of knowledge about a subject with which one is familiar is a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge.

I’m not saying you have the brain of a three-year-old… but, you do. Keep reading.
Oftentimes, once we know something, we find it difficult to imagine not knowing it. The quality of our engagements with other individuals is dictated by how well we can manage the chasm between our personal knowledge space and the next person’s background to understand that of which we speak. There are a lot of examples where the curse of knowledge occurs to the detriment of the desired outcome. You may consider any environment from the classroom to the boardroom.

A teacher that fails to manage the chasm alienates her pupils and decreases her chances of successfully imparting knowledge. Giving instructions that assume knowledge in others that they do not possess fails to achieve any sort of outcome, for it registers incomprehensible; you may as well be speaking Dothraki or Morse code or any other such language sufficiently foreign to your audience. Boardrooms are rife with this phenomenon. You find industry experts bending and twisting themselves into knots, opting to put on display their Ivy League education in lieu of actually communicating. Experienced executives love sweeping, general language. Ubeva sebatsi ‘unlocking shareholder value’ noma ‘achieving stakeholder delight’. Employees leave the boardroom with nothing to action, and hence compromise an otherwise sensible strategy because top executives communicate as if we all live in their heads.

As the Harvard Business Review published in 2006, in the business world, managers and employees, marketers and customers, corporate headquarters and the frontline, all rely on ongoing communication but suffer from enormous information imbalances. This can be thwarted through the use of basic communication skills. I don’t understand why explaining things simply is going out of style. Einstein said; “If you can’t explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough.” Maybe those who we do not understand have a tenuous grasp on the subject matter to begin with. How could you possibly hope to understand anyone who struggles to understand themselves?

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: