The Curse of Knowledge

Try tapping out "Happy Birthday" on your desk. Do you think someone else could identify that song?

In Elizabeth Newton's 1990 Stanford experiment, people thought their listeners would guess correctly about 50% of the time. In reality, they guessed correctly just 2.5% of the time!

The problem? The tappers could hear the entire song in their heads. The listeners just heard tapping.

This is a beautiful illustration of the Curse of Knowledge, a psychological principle that unveils the science behind why engineers should never write brochures.

The bottom line: once you know something really well, it's hard to remember what it was like not to know it. So, expertise can actually make us worse at communicating value to people who don't share that expertise.

It's something that happens to all of us when we become experts at what we do.

In medical technology it's easy for us to get excited about the new features and technical capabilities of a product. But sometimes we're so familiar with what makes a product remarkable that we forget how to make its value clear to the people who might benefit from it.

The real test of communication isn't what we say. It's what the other person takes away.