The implications of the “curse of knowledge” is profound. I’m sure many people have found themselves in lectures where professors, unaware of the lack of knowledge their students exhibit, breeze through lecture slides without taking a moment to step back and realize that their students don’t all share the same starting off point. The fact that people generally don’t convey information to others if they assume it is already shared has tremendous applications to all industries and any situation in which you need to transfer knowledge to someone else. There are always things you take for granted and forget that you have learned over time.
In American public schools, early math education is often described as “circular,” in that you learn certain topics in one grade and then incrementally build upon it in the next year. In third or fourth grade, you learn long division, but in order to be good at that, you need to have practiced basic division facts and subtraction. In order to do harder subtraction problems and carry numbers over, you have to have learned basic math facts. In order to learn basic adding and subtracting, you need to master counting. When the school system is built on this spiral curriculum, it leaves to a widening gap in the kids who need extra help. If a child didn’t learn a certain math skill very well last year and are unable to retain it or have it “click” for them, then having teachers start at a point, where it’s assumed that a child is good at a certain concept already, leaves certain kids in a vicious cycle of falling farther and farther behind their peers. New “data” in this case would be lost on them.
People always say that the best way to learn something is to teach it to others. It allows you to figure out what you do and don’t know by addressing another person’s questions. It also proves that you know the information enough to break it down to a point where it can be digested and transferred to someone who has never seen the information before.
What’s funny about the “curse of knowledge” is that people generally don’t convey information to others if they assume it is already shared.
Referenced In:
"The Curse of Knowledge in Visual Data Communication"
Researchers found that once people were primed to recognize a certain pattern in a set of visual data, they assumed that the naive observers would also immediately see the same pattern (even those who did not have access to the same information).