Picture this. A brilliant colleague is presenting the new data platform. He knows every feature, every integration point, every technical decision behind it. After 45 minutes he looks out at the room. Blank faces. No questions. Not because everything was clear, but because nobody understood a word. Afterwards, someone whispers to you: “I have no idea what he just said.”
The presenter is not stupid. He is probably the smartest person in the room. And that is precisely the problem. The more you know about something, the worse you become at explaining it to people who do not know it. This is the curse of knowledge at work. And it is one of the most underestimated barriers in organisations.
The curse of knowledge is the cognitive bias that makes it impossible, once you know something, to accurately estimate what it is like not to know it. In the workplace it sabotages presentations, onboarding and product design because experts unconsciously assume too much prior knowledge. The solution is not “speak more simply” but structurally building in feedback from your target audience - using tools such as the SUE Influence Framework.
What is the curse of knowledge?
The curse of knowledge is a System 1 bias that works like a one-way gate: once you know something, you cannot go back to the state of not knowing it. Your brain simply cannot put itself in that position. And it automatically fills the blind spot with the assumption that others know it too.[1]
The term was introduced in 1989 by economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber. They discovered that traders in financial markets systematically overestimate how much information other parties have. Even when explicitly told that the other party knew less, they could not “switch off” their own knowledge when estimating the other person’s decisions.[2]
But it is an experiment by Elizabeth Newton at Stanford University that makes the bias most tangible. In 1990 she had participants tap the rhythm of well-known songs on a table while a listener tried to guess the song. The tappers predicted that listeners would identify the song 50% of the time. The actual rate? 2.5%. The tappers could hear the melody in their heads while they tapped. The listeners heard only tapping.[3]
This is the core of the bias. It operates on three levels at once.
You overestimate shared knowledge. You assume that the terms, abbreviations and background context that are second nature to you are equally obvious to everyone else. This applies to the IT manager talking about “API endpoints” to the board, but equally to the HR professional mentioning “total rewards” to a new starter.
You underestimate the complexity of your message. Because you understand it, it seems simple. You skip steps, jump to conclusions and forget that your audience has not walked the path that led you to that conclusion.
You interpret silence as understanding. When nobody asks questions after your explanation, you conclude it was clear. But silence in the workplace often means the opposite: people do not understand, but do not want to look foolish by admitting it.
The curse of knowledge is the reason brilliant experts are sometimes the worst explainers. They hear the melody in their head. Their audience hears only tapping.
Three situations where it does the most damage
The presentation nobody understands
I regularly work with teams that need to communicate complex change programmes to the rest of the organisation. What strikes me every time: the people who know the most about the project are almost always the worst at explaining it to others.
Take a situation I witnessed last year. A team of data analysts had spent three months building a new reporting model. They presented their work to the management team with slides full of charts, technical specifications and methodological justifications. It was careful work. But afterwards the finance director said: “I still don’t understand what this means for our quarterly figures.”
The team was frustrated. They had explained everything. But they had explained it from their own frame of reference. The steps that seemed so logical to them - from data model to interpretation to implication - were invisible to the directors. The team heard the melody. The directors heard tapping.
Steven Pinker calls the curse of knowledge the single biggest cause of bad writing. The same applies to bad presenting. The problem is not that the expert knows too little. The problem is that she knows too much and can no longer step outside it.[4]
The product nobody can use
When you work on a product long enough, you forget what it feels like to see it for the first time. This is one of the most common ways the curse of knowledge traps product teams.
Think of software with dozens of features that each make perfect sense individually - to the team that built them. But for a new user it is an overwhelming screen full of buttons, menus and options with no clear starting point. The team calls it “a powerful platform”. The user calls it “confusing”.
IKEA understood this long ago. Their assembly instructions are designed for someone who has never seen the piece of furniture before, not for the engineer who conceived it. Almost no text. Only visual steps, numbered and in order. It is the opposite of the curse of knowledge: design from ignorance, not from expertise.
Apple did the same when launching the original iPhone in 2007. Steve Jobs stood on stage and did not describe the product as a phone with a touchscreen, rotatable interface and internet browser. He said: “An iPod, a phone and an internet communicator.” Three things the audience already knew. Then he revealed it was one device. Jobs was not the smartest engineer at Apple. But he was the best translator. He could set aside his own knowledge and think from the perspective of someone who had never seen the product.
The onboarding nobody learns from
New employees are flooded with information in their first weeks. Systems, processes, abbreviations, names, unwritten rules. The people who design the onboarding are typically those who have worked at the organisation for years. And that is where the problem starts.
An HR manager I spoke with told me their onboarding was “very thorough”. And that was true: the programme contained everything a new employee needed to know. The problem was that the programme had been designed by people who already knew what was important and what was not. The new employee received everything at once, without hierarchy, without priority, without context.
After three weeks the new starters knew exactly how the travel expense form worked. But they still had no idea how decisions were actually made in the organisation. The onboarding gave them the handbook, but not the translation key.
This is the curse of knowledge at its purest. The designers of the onboarding can no longer remember what it was like to be new. They no longer know which pieces of information they themselves only understood after six months. And so they build a programme that makes sense from their perspective, but is overwhelming from the newcomer’s.
Why “explain it more simply” is not enough
The standard advice for the curse of knowledge is: “Explain it more simply.” But when you analyse the problem with the Influence Framework, you see why that advice falls short.
The driving forces are clear. The Pains of the current behaviour are real: presentations that do not land, products that are not adopted, new employees who need months to become productive. And the Gains of change are tangible: clear communication, faster adoption, better collaboration. So far it sounds straightforward.
But the blocking forces are stubborn. The Comforts are deeply embedded. Experts like speaking in their own language. It feels safe, it confirms their identity as a specialist and it is cognitively cheap - you do not need to think about how to explain something if you simply say it the way you understand it yourself. On top of that, many organisational cultures reward complex language. In boardrooms and management meetings, jargon confers status. Simple language can even be perceived as superficial.[5]
The Anxieties are subtler but at least as powerful. An expert who simplifies their message risks colleagues thinking the work itself was simple. “If you can summarise it in three sentences, was it really that complex?” The fear of not being taken seriously keeps experts trapped in incomprehensible communication.
The comfort of status through complexity and the fear of being underestimated are together stronger than any rational argument for “communicating more simply”. This is precisely the pattern you encounter in every behaviour change challenge: the restricting forces override the driving forces. You cannot solve it by pushing harder. You have to change the environment.
Five interventions that change the environment
If awareness is not enough and well-meaning advice does not work, what does? The solution lies in structurally building in mechanisms that force you to set aside your own knowledge.
1. The “outsider review” as standard practice. Before any presentation, manual or internal message goes out, have it reviewed by someone who is not involved in the project. Not as a favour, but as a fixed step in the process. Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, call this the “concreteness test”: if someone outside your team does not understand it, it is not clear enough. Not because your audience is dim, but because your message has not yet been translated.[6]
2. Start with the conclusion, not the method. Most experts tell the story in the order they discovered it: first the data, then the analysis, then the conclusion. But your audience has not taken that journey. Reverse it. Start with what it means. Then work back to the evidence. This is not oversimplification. It is respect for the cognitive load on your recipient.
3. Use concrete examples instead of abstract principles. “We need to improve our customer experience” is abstract and activates nothing in System 1. “The customer calls three times before her parcel gets returned” is concrete and immediately understandable. Concrete language bypasses the curse of knowledge because it conjures the same image for everyone, regardless of prior knowledge.
4. Design onboarding through the eyes of a newcomer. Have new employees who have just finished their first month review and redesign the onboarding. They are the only people who still remember what it felt like to be new. After six months they themselves are infected by the curse of knowledge. This is a short window you must actively use.
5. Build “translators” into the process as a role, not an accident. In many organisations there are people who are naturally good at translating complex material. But that is coincidence, not design. Make it explicit. Appoint someone who, at every presentation or document, has the role of asking: “Would someone outside our team understand this?” Not as criticism, but as a quality check.
How the curse of knowledge interacts with other biases
The curse of knowledge does not operate in isolation. In the workplace it amplifies other biases in ways that make the problem especially hard to recognise.
The Dunning-Kruger effect works as the mirror image of the curse of knowledge. Where the curse of knowledge makes experts underestimate other people’s ignorance, the Dunning-Kruger effect makes beginners overestimate their own knowledge. In a meeting this can become a toxic combination: the expert explains something at a level nobody follows, while the beginner thinks they have already understood it. Both get stuck, for opposite reasons.
The framing effect plays a role because experts unconsciously choose a frame that makes sense from their perspective, but not from the recipient’s. A financial analyst who talks about “a 3% downward revision” frames it differently from saying: “We expect to make £300,000 less in revenue.” The same fact, but the second version lands with everyone.
And the availability heuristic reinforces the bias: information that is easily available to you (because you work with it daily) feels “obvious”. Your brain automatically assumes that what is available to you is also available to others. But availability is not the same as universality.
Recognising how these biases interact is practically valuable. Because an intervention that only addresses the curse of knowledge (such as “use less jargon”) misses the bigger picture. An outsider review combined with concrete language, a conclusion-first structure and systematic user testing creates a system that tackles multiple biases at once.
Frequently asked questions
What is the curse of knowledge in simple terms?
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that makes it impossible for people who know something to accurately estimate what it is like not to know it. You unconsciously assume that others share the same background knowledge you have. This makes your communication unclear without you realising it.
What is an example of the curse of knowledge at work?
An IT department rolls out a new software system and sends a manual full of jargon and abbreviations. To them it is perfectly clear. To the sales team that needs to use the software daily, the manual reads as if it were written in a different language. The result: low adoption, frustration and workarounds.
How do you prevent the curse of knowledge in presentations?
Test your presentation on someone outside your field before you deliver it. Use concrete examples instead of abstract concepts. Explain every piece of jargon as though your audience is hearing it for the first time. And start with the conclusion, not the method. The most effective presenters are not the smartest, but those who translate best.
What is the difference between the curse of knowledge and the Dunning-Kruger effect?
The Dunning-Kruger effect is about overestimating your own competence when you know very little. The curse of knowledge is about being unable to estimate someone else’s ignorance when you know a great deal. They are opposite problems: with Dunning-Kruger you know too little and think you know enough. With the curse of knowledge you know too much and forget that others are not on the same level.
Can you unlearn the curse of knowledge?
No. The curse of knowledge is an automatic System 1 process that you cannot switch off by thinking about it. Even when you know about the bias, you still fall for it. The solution lies in designing feedback structures: systematically test your communication on your target audience, build in peer reviews and use the audience as your compass instead of your own expertise.
Conclusion
Want to learn how to structurally tackle communication barriers and cognitive biases in your organisation? In the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course you learn to apply the Influence Framework and the SWAC Tool to understand your target audience’s perspective and change behaviour. Rated 9.7/10 by 10,000+ professionals.
PS
At SUE our mission is to use the superpower of behavioural psychology to help people make positive choices. The curse of knowledge is a bias I encounter daily myself. When you have spent years in the world of Behavioural Design, you sometimes forget what it was like to enter that world for the first time. I fall for it regularly. The trick is not to try to prevent it. The trick is to have people around you who honestly say: “I don’t understand what you mean.” And then not to think the problem is with them.
