The curse of knowledge

By Gerfried Ambrosch

We tend to find it difficult to imagine what it is like for someone else not to know something we know. This “pervasive affliction of the human mind,” as the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker calls it in his book The Sense of Style, can seriously impair our capacity to communicate. After all, successful communication often depends on our ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes.

Up to a certain age, children are largely incapable of separating their own knowledge from someone else’s, as a famous experiment demonstrates: a child comes into a lab, opens a candy box, and is surprised to find pencils in it; when asked what another child entering the lab will think is in the box, the answer, almost invariably, is pencils. In fact, the young subjects in this experiment even assert that they themselves knew all along that the box contained pencils.

According to Pinker, we outgrow this cognitive inability as we get older—but not entirely and to varying degrees. In many situations, it simply doesn’t occur to us that the people we communicate with don’t know what we know. For instance, giving a stranger directions in our hometown can be a real challenge, because reference points that seem logical and obvious to us may not make any sense to them. Indeed, they may find it impossible to visualize what we mean, while we walk around with a vivid mental map stored in our brain.

Writer’s block

The same principle applies, analogously, to writing, especially when it comes to imparting expert knowledge to lay readers. “The curse of knowledge,” writes Pinker, “is the single best explanation why good people write bad prose. [They] can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention”; nor do they usually “bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.”

A cynic might say that opaque prose is often deliberate, reflecting Nietzsche’s aphorism, “Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity.” As someone with a background in literary and cultural studies, a field notorious for its jargon-laden, convoluted, and highfalutin academese, I have reason to suspect that there is at least some truth to this. But as another adage, known as Hanlon’s Razor, warns us, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance.” In other words, the curse of knowledge, which, somewhat paradoxically, makes writers blind to their readers’ lack of knowledge, goes a long way toward explaining unintelligible prose.

Lost in translation

In translation, the curse of knowledge can be especially problematic. For instance, when translated, cultural references unique to a particular language area can make for confusing copy. Professional translators are, of course, aware of this problem and always have an elegant solution up their sleeves. Another difficulty peculiar to translation is that the original names of things, such as products or places, often contain information that is obvious to the translator but may be lost on those unversed in the source language. This phenomenon is more common than we might think.

Here is an example from my own experience as a wine tour guide in Vienna and Lower Austria: The owner of a quaint little wine bar we frequently visited on our tours would always bring out a regional specialty known as Gemischter Satz, a traditional type of wine made from several different grape varieties that are harvested and fermented together. Right off the bat and without providing any context, he would explain to our English-speaking guests: “This is not a cuvée.” My immediate reaction was: why would they think that it is? Then it dawned on me: to him, it was obvious that the name Gemischter Satz implied a mixing or blending of wines (gemischt means mixed in German), and he simply didn’t consider that a non-German speaker wouldn’t know this. Other examples included place names such as Bisamberg: local winemakers would often refer to the geography of this wine-growing municipality outside Vienna in ways that made no sense unless you knew that Berg means mountain or hill in German.

From knowing to understanding

These are easy mistakes to make given our limited psychological capacity for adopting another person’s vantage point. In fact, I may have made a curse-of-knowledge error myself in the previous paragraph by not explaining what a cuvée is. After all, not everyone knows that a cuvée is a blend of different wines. However, this may be a borderline case. In cases like this, the question becomes: is it reasonable to assume that most readers know what a given word or expression means? This can be difficult to determine.

While it makes sense to always err on the side of caution, there is a danger of including too much information, which can also impair communication. Often, less is indeed more. A lengthy sentence cluttered with details can be difficult to parse and understand. In many cases, however, this problem appears to be yet another manifestation of the curse of knowledge: the author expects the reader to possess the knowledge and expertise required to separate the wheat from the chaff—which may not be such a great idea if your goal is to get a point across.

So, how can we avoid the curse of knowledge? In other words, how can we become more empathic communicators? According to Pinker, “Anyone who wants to lift the curse of knowledge must first appreciate what a devilish curse it is. Like a drunk who is too impaired to realize that he is too impaired to drive, we do not notice the curse, because the curse prevents us from noticing it.” But once we become aware of the curse, we can take active steps to exorcise it: we can make a conscious effort to imagine what it must be like for someone else not to know what we know; in fact, all we really need to do is recall a time before we, ourselves, knew what we know today.