Curse of Knowledge
Tappers and Listeners
The difficulty of imagining what it's like not to know something you already know. Experts chronically overestimate how well others understand them because they can't un-know their own expertise.
EverydayConcepts.io
Origin
First described by economists Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein in a 1989 paper. Famously illustrated by Elizabeth Newton's 1990 "Tappers and Listeners" experiment at Stanford: tappers who tapped out well-known songs predicted listeners would guess correctly 50% of the time, but listeners only guessed 2.5% correctly. The tappers couldn't un-hear the melody playing in their heads.
Updated February 22, 2026