THINKER'S ALMANAC - September 18

How can tapping out the tune to “Happy Birthday” with your pencil help you learn to communicate better?

Subject:  The Curse of Knowledge - Tappers and Listeners

Event:  Birthday of cognitive scientist and author Steven Pinker, 1954

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows. -Steven Pinker

It’s one thing to have knowledge, but what good is that knowledge if you cannot pass it on to an audience?

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay

Steven Pinker, who was born on this day in 1954, is a cognitive scientist who has devoted his life to communicating the workings of the human mind in clear language to a general audience.  In other words, you don’t need to be a cognitive scientist to understand what this cognitive scientist is saying about the human mind.  One of the reasons that Pinker’s communication is so clear is that he specializes in language, specifically the ways in which humans are innately hardwired for language.  As Pinker puts it: “Humans...can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.”

In 2014, Pinker wrote a book devoted to helping people communicate their thinking clearly in writing called The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.  In this book, Pinker devoted an entire chapter to a concept that explains the difficulty so many people have communicating their ideas clearly to others.  Whether giving a speech or writing an essay or an explanation, people frequently stumble when it comes to transforming their thoughts into language that is clear enough to be understood by an audience or a reader.  Dr. Pinker’s diagnosis of this problem is called the curse of knowledge.  The term, which was coined by economist Robin Hogarth, is defined simply as our inability to imagine what it is like for someone else not to know something that we know.  For example, some university professors are notorious for bad teaching, not because they are bad people, but because they don’t make the effort to put themselves in the shoes of their students.  These professors have immersed themselves so deeply into a specific academic field, that they have forgotten what it is like to not know what they know. 

The reality of the curse of knowledge was first demonstrated in a 1990 study by Elizabeth Newton, a Stanford University graduate student in psychology.  Newton created a game where the players were given one of two roles:  “tappers” or “listeners.”  The tappers were first given a list of well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”  Next, the tappers were instructed to tap out the rhythm of the songs on a tabletop.  The task of the listeners was to identify the name of each song that went with each tapped-out tune.

 

When asked to predict how successful the listeners would be in identifying their songs, the tappers predicted 50%.  This prediction wasn’t close.  Of the 120 songs tapped out, the listeners guessed only three, a 2.5% success rate.  The curse of knowledge explains the large disparity between the tappers’ predictions and their actual success rate.  As they tapped out their tunes, they could not avoid hearing the song in their heads; the listeners, however, only heard the taps.  The tappers were “cursed” by their knowledge of the songs’ melodies and were unable to imagine what it was like for the listener to hear only the tapping (1).

The prescription for overcoming the curse of knowledge is to constantly remember your audience.  When you are writing or speaking, the success of your communication depends on your ability to transfer your message to your audience.  Therefore, don’t presume your audience understands the technical jargon you’re using.  Define your terms, use analogies, and provide showing concrete examples.  As Pinker puts it, “Always remember the reader over your shoulder.”  As humans we have something called the “theory of mind,” the ability to intuit the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of others.  When it comes to communicating ideas, we often suffer from mindblindness, a lack of the theory of mind.  This mindblindness is why the curse of knowledge exists.  The antidote is empathy.  Remember your audience.  Try to step out of your shoes and into the shoes of your audience. 

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the Curse of Knowledge, and how does the tappers and listeners study help reveal its validity?

Challenge - Abstract to Concrete:  Select an abstract concept that you understand well, such as cognitive dissonance or social proof.  Write a paragraph defining and explaining the concept.  Assume that your audience is totally unfamiliar with the concept, and attempt to overcome the curse of knowledge by imagining the concept from the perspective of someone who has never heard of it before.

Also on This Day:

September 18, 1708:  Today is the birthday of Samuel Johnson (1708-1784), the writer of the first scholarly researched English dictionary.  His work A Dictionary of the English Language was published in two volumes on April 15, 1755.  Johnson’s dictionary was not the first dictionary in English, but what made it special was its use of illustrative quotations by the best writers in English.  

Sources:

1-Pinker, Stephen. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. New York, NY: Penguin, 2014.