Curse of Knowledge
Tappers and Listeners
A cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand. A famous example of this is the "Tappers and Listeners" study — an experiment in psychology in 1990 where "Tappers" were given a list of well-known songs and asked to tap out the rhythm of a song on a table. "Listeners" had to guess the song based on the tapping. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%. But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%.
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Origin
First described in a 1989 paper by the economists Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein. The concept of the Curse of Knowledge has since been widely recognized in psychology, communication studies, and education, and has been used to describe the challenges of communication and persuasion in a variety of contexts.