This is the fourth installment in a five-part series on bias.
March 23, 2022
By Rachel Smith
This month we’re exploring cognitive biases that can easily trip us up in our professional lives, and this week we have arrived at my favorite—the curse of knowledge! Yes, I have a favorite cognitive bias. Doesn’t everyone? (If there was any doubt about my nerdiness, I think this officially confirmed what most of you already knew.)
The curse of knowledge is a bias in which, once we know something, we find it difficult to imagine not knowing it. We can no longer put ourselves in the state of mind of not knowing it. The curse of knowledge causes us to assume that everyone knows as much as we do on a particular topic.
A now-famous study by a Stanford graduate student perfectly illustrates the curse of knowledge in action. Study participants were broken up into two groups—the tappers and the listeners. Each tapper chose a song and then would tap the melody using their finger. Each listener was tasked with listening to the tapped melody and guessing the song.
The tappers in the study predicted that the listeners would be able to guess the song correctly 50 percent of the time. In actuality, the listeners were able to guess the correct song only 2.5 percent of the time. Why?? The curse of knowledge! Once the tappers could hear the tune in their own heads, they were incapable of putting themselves in the position of the listener who was only hearing a finger tapping on a table.
I think I love the curse of knowledge so much because of its universality. Every single person has experienced it. Every single field suffers from it. I worked in the field of public science education for a long time, and it was my job to keep the curse of knowledge from getting in the way of education.
A researcher at a zoo might want to tell everyone, “Cheetahs have a monomorphic major histocompatibility complex due to a genetic bottleneck which makes captive populations susceptible to pathogen transmission.” Have you glazed over yet? Not only have you lost interest, but you probably think that the researcher is kind of being a jerk and thinks he’s smarter than you. It was my job to turn that gobbledygook into, “Cheetahs are so inbred that they basically have identical immune systems. In fact, a cheetah can accept a skin graft from any other cheetah! (Isn’t that crazy?!) That also means that if one cheetah gets sick at a zoo, all of them are likely to get sick.”
So, you see what the curse of knowledge is, and you can probably point to a lot of instances of it happening to you. Did you ever have a brilliant professor who was a horrible teacher? Curse of knowledge. Have you ever had someone try and teach you how to do something and completely skip over critical steps? Curse of knowledge. Do you ever throw terms around like next-gen and bleeding edge? Wait, what?
Yes, you too have been cursed. Sales professionals get zapped by the curse of knowledge just like everyone else. In fact, research suggests that salespeople who are more informed about the product they are selling are at a disadvantage compared to less informed salespeople.
So, what are we all supposed to do? We can’t stop learning about things, especially our own products. But there are some ways you can combat the curse of knowledge.
For the Love of All That Is Good Please Stop Using Acronyms
Seriously, just stop. Acronyms are ostensibly meant to make our lives easier, but they create so much confusion. At the very least, stop using acronyms when speaking to those outside of your organization. Using a term or acronym that a potential client doesn’t understand is only going to make them feel dumb, which is the opposite of what you should be doing.
And really, we should be using them less within our own organizations too. When you include your design team in an email, your use of the acronym SQL might mean sales qualified lead to you, but they interpret it as structured query language. I know that NPS means net promotor score. I have written blogs about net promoter scores. But when I see NPS my brain always translates it as non-point source pollution first because that’s the acronym I learned first. Are there lawyers on your team? Healthcare professionals? Cybersecurity experts? Take it from a biologist turned educator who worked in government—we have no idea what you’re talking about and are frantically googling acronyms during meetings.
Explain It Like I’m 12
If I was a curmudgeonly professor unaware of the curse of knowledge, I would tell you to follow the Feynman technique. Since I’m not, I will explain that the Feynman technique basically means that you pretend to explain something to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you need to work on your explanation.
We’ve written before about readability, and that B2B sales professionals should aim for a middle-school level when writing. The same goes for talking, at least in the beginning. Your prospect does not have the background information and knowledge that you do about your product, so explain it the same way you would to your grandmother or your teenage nephew. Or explain it to my grandmother, who would not hesitate to tell you to “go bang your head against a wall” if you complained about being bored. I would have loved to see her reaction to someone explaining the need to “leverage synergies.”
Get a Fresh, Honest Perspective
Give your sales pitch to your partner. Share your copy with your best friend. You need to ask for input from someone who is not in your field and will be brutally honest with you. Have them take notes about what confused them.
Sometimes the fresh and honest perspective can even be your own. Have you ever gone through your own product onboarding process? It can be eye-opening to do so and identify areas of friction that can be improved.
Use Examples and Tell a Story
Stories can make something make sense better than just an explanation. Remember the cheetah? Saying that all cheetahs can accept skin grafts from each other illustrates genetic sameness better than just saying they are genetically very similar.
Share case studies of how your product helped someone else in a similar position to your prospect. Storytelling engages people much more than simply sharing facts. It’s a great technique that explains your product in a way your prospect can immediately relate to.
We have all been victims of the curse of knowledge. It can impact any communications we have with others in which there is an information imbalance. When it happens, nobody will tell you it’s happening when you’re the one who is cursed. Nobody wants to admit to not understanding something.
The ideas above can help you combat the curse of knowledge, and you can also simply ask if the other person understands. But there’s a right and wrong way to do that. By default, most of us go to, “Does that make sense?” That still forces someone to admit to not understanding. Instead, try something like, “What have I left unanswered?” or “What part of what I said needs clarification?” That puts any fault with you, rather than the intelligence of your prospect.
Even just being aware of the curse of knowledge can help you combat it. You can’t unknow what you know, but you should at least know that knowing makes it hard to imagine not knowing, you know?
Ready for some more cursed knowledge? Contact us at mastery@maestrogroup.co to schedule workshops for your team or ask about our leadership development program.
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