When 'Common Sense' Isn't Common Across Generations: The Curse of Knowledge

A famous experiment by Elizabeth Newton involved people tapping out well-known songs with their fingers. The "tappers" (who knew the songs) predicted listeners would recognize 50% of the songs, but listeners only identified 2.5%. The tappers couldn't imagine not hearing the melody in their heads.

This is known as the Curse of Knowledge.

Chip and Dan Heath wrote all about it in their fantastic book "Made to Stick":

It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

The Curse of Knowledge is a well-established cognitive bias in which people who are knowledgeable about a topic have difficulty imagining what it's like not to know that information. Once you know something, it becomes nearly impossible to think about it from the perspective of someone who doesn't.

Once you learn something, you can't "unlearn" it to see the topic fresh. Experts consistently overestimate how obvious their knowledge is to others. The Curse of Knowledge creates several distinct challenges in intergenerational workplaces, where different age cohorts bring vastly different baseline knowledge and experiences, rooted in learning from different times in history.  The Curse works in both directions--older to younger and younger to older.

Check out these examples and see if any of them sound familiar:

This Meeting Could Have Been An Email

Different generations assume their preferred communication methods are universal. Boomers or Gen Xers might expect phone calls or face-to-face meetings for discussions because of their experience with the richness of those channels, while Millennials or Gen Z  handle the same conversation via Slack or text because of their increased functionality and efficiency. In both cases, we assume others understand the advantages we see, leading to misunderstandings about urgency, formality, or expectations.

Similarly, when it comes to office politics, older employees often assume everyone knows unwritten norms about hierarchy, approvals, or follow-up protocols that younger employees were never taught. When younger employees miss the mark, they tend to get labeled as "lacking professionalism",  when it's possible we may have missed a step in their onboarding where such norms needed to be laid out as necessary organizational standards.

Ok, Boomer

The most popular age-based stereotype in the workplace is that tired trope that older people can't learn new technology, but that, too, is related to the Curse of Knowledge. Digital natives often struggle to understand how someone unfamiliar with technology can grasp concepts they intuitively know, and may underestimate the learning curve for those interacting with it for the first time. This can lead to skipped steps, rushed explanations, and universal frustration.

Office Hours

For those of us who have experienced the majority of our careers showing up every day to an office, those intangibles that a vibrant workplace can bring are a no-brainer. Popping your head into your boss's office to ask a quick question,  grabbing weekly coffee with a co-worker, or discovering it's your assistant's birthday when someone brings a cake into the break room. These things seem trivial on a day-to-day basis, but over time they build commitment, strengthen relationships, and help make work something you can look forward to.

But many of our younger employees started their careers behind a computer screen, not getting any of that sickly sweet birthday cake, but also skipping the commute. While we can't imagine not understanding the benefits of occasionally being in the office, our younger colleagues may have a much harder time grasping why return-to-the-office mandates are occurring in some companies when their work can often be done efficiently and effectively from home. This is the Curse of Knowledge in action: if you've benefitted from a positive in-office culture, you likely have a hard time imagining a career without it.

Never fear, Gentelligence has a strategy to combat the Curse of Knowledge.

First, be aware of the warning signs that you have fallen victim to The Curse:

• You hear yourself saying, "How do they not understand this?"
• Someone refers to the issue in question as a "no-brainer"
• Someone older or younger than you is struggling to understand something that seems unbelievably clear to you

Then we need to use one of my newest Gentelligence tools:

Make the Implicit more Explicit.

Implicit: implied, suggested, or understood without being directly stated.

Explicit: stated directly, clearly, and without any room for confusion.

Instead of skipping the logic or context, realize that you likely have a blindspot.  The only way to escape The Curse of Knowledge is to ask yourself what you are seeing that someone who lacks your experience may not realize.

To make the implicit more explicit, try out phrases like:

"Let me back up and explain why this matters..."

"For context, this connects to..."

"The background you need to know is..."

"This might seem obvious, but..."

"What's not immediately clear is..."

"The reason we do it this way is..."

"The piece that's not visible is..."

You can always invite someone to stop you if they already have the information. I've started saying "I've realized I often assume people are on the same page as me when in fact we are getting wires crossed, so I'm trying to be better about slowing down and providing an opportunity for people to ask questions."

Have you experienced The Curse of Knowledge? I'd love to hear about it.