My wife and I have been binge-watching old seasons of the Amazing Race, in our minds one of the best reality television shows of all time! The other night, as we were sitting down and getting ready to watch, I started humming the theme song to the show. Well, I guess I wasn't really humming. It sounded more like this: "Dunt - dunt - dunt - dun-dun-dun - dunt - dunt - dunt" (hey - you be the judge, check out the theme song here). My wife gave me one of those "I can't believe I've been married to you for so long, you are too weird" looks. And I guess I deserved that look. She really had no idea of what I was humming. As I write this post, I realize that the way I wrote how I hummed the song is exactly how she heard it. It just doesn't make any sense now, and it definitely didn't make any sense then.
A few years ago, Dr. Elizabeth Newman conducted a study for her PhD dissertation (see "The rocky road from actions to intentions" at Stanford University that will be incredibly relevant to this post, at least so far. She randomized 80 Stanford undergraduates to two groups - the "Tappers" and the "Listeners." Tappers selected three different tunes from a list of 25 common songs (e.g. Yankee Doodle, The Brady Bunch theme, This Land is Your Land, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, It's a Small World (after all), etc). They then performed the three tunes - by tapping out the tune with their knuckles - to a group of Listeners. Newman asked the Tappers to predict what percentage of the Listeners would be able to name the tune after each performance.
I don't think that my wife would be surprised by Dr. Newman's results! The Tappers predicted that 50% (on average, the predictions ranged from 10 to 95%) of the Listeners would be able to name each tune. However, in reality, only 2.5% of the Listeners were able to correctly name a tune (3 tunes were identified correctly out of a total of 120 different songs). Just to confirm her findings, Dr. Newman had also recruited a group of observers who were informed in advance of the tune that was going to be tapped out. The Tappers played to both the Observers and the Listeners. The Observers predicted that 50% of the Listeners would be able to correctly name each tune, similar to the Tappers' prediction.
Chip and Dan Heath summarized it best in an article published in the Harvard Business Review: "The problem is that once we know something - say, the melody of a song - we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. We have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can't readily re-create their state of mind."
What the Tappers (and the Observers) experienced - what I experienced more recently in my futile attempts to convince my wife that I was humming the Amazing Race theme song - is known as the "the curse of knowledge" (it's also known as the "curse of expertise"). The term was first used by the economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber in a study published in a 1989 article in the Journal of Political Economy. The "curse" is actually a type of cognitive bias in which those of us who are better informed about a particular subject (i.e., the experts) find it next to impossible to consider that subject from the point of view of someone who is less informed about it. So, the Tappers find it impossible to understand why the Listeners can't identify the tunes that they are tapping out.
I am reminded of the old adage in medicine (which summarizes a teaching philosophy that is thankfully no longer practiced), "See one. Do one. Teach one." In other words, if you can understand and comprehend something well enough that you can explain it to others, you've probably mastered the concept or skill. The problem, as explained by the "curse of expertise" is that once you go well past the "Teach one" stage, the concept or skill becomes almost second nature. You perform the skill without really thinking about it. At this point, the nuances of the concept or skill are so deeply embedded in the dark corners of your mind, that it becomes almost impossible for you to teach the concept or skill well enough to others. As Chip and Dan Heath explain, "Our knowledge has 'cursed' us. We have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can’t readily re-create their state of mind." It's impossible for us to fathom not knowing the concept or skill.
All of us are subject to cognitive biases that can affect how we make decisions or interpret the world around us. The so-called "curse of expertise" is just one example of many possible biases. Knowing about these biases is just the first step, but it's an important one.
No comments:
Post a Comment