Curse of Knowledge
What is the Curse of Knowledge?
The curse of knowledge, also known as the curse of expertise, is a cognitive bias in which we assume that the people we are talking to have the same level of understanding as we do on a given subject. This often causes a barrier to effective knowledge sharing as we are uncertain about what the other party already knows.
The Basic Idea
People often say, “knowledge is power.” But what happens when we all have different levels of knowledge?
The “curse of knowledge,” or “the curse of expertise,” is a cognitive bias where we incorrectly assume that everyone knows as much as we do on a given topic.1 When we know something, it can be hard to imagine what it would be like not knowing that piece of information. In turn, this makes it difficult to share our knowledge because we struggle to understand the other party’s state of mind. The curse of knowledge can profoundly affect how information is communicated, particularly by experts and educators. These individuals often struggle to convey complex concepts effectively because they have difficulty imagining what it’s like for others to lack the depth of knowledge they possess.
"Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the curse of knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know."
– Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
