don't fall victim to "the curse of knowledge"

During the pandemic, most parents—myself included—gained a newfound respect and admiration for teachers, as we discovered how challenging home schooling could be. On many occasions, tensions were raised in the Rowe household when what I considered elementary concepts across language, maths and science weren’t absorbed instantly by my children (“How can you not understand that 25% is also a quarter?!”).

At the time, I blamed my struggles on a lack of patience and teaching skills. I soon came to realise, after a particular experience here at storytelling with data, that I shouldn’t have been so self-critical. 

One day, having reached out for feedback on a blog article I was planning to post regarding Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), I was cautioned to be mindful of falling victim to “the curse of knowledge.” 

For those unfamiliar with this phrase, the curse of knowledge is a bias occurring in an individual, who when communicating with an audience, assumes a similar amount of understanding and background knowledge from that audience. It’s a trap that we are all vulnerable to, and it manifests in all kinds of ways. 

For instance, the creator of a visual may assume that the context and next steps are clear to themself, and thus be tempted to leave vital information out, avoid making a clear recommendation and ultimately asking the audience to draw their own conclusions. As you can imagine, this is less than ideal for an audience, who without that essential context is likely to make incorrect assumptions, draw faulty conclusions, and/or feel overwhelmed by or disengaged from the subject matter. 

Apparently, my considerable experience working in the field of reporting had led me to assume my audience had the same amount of KPI-related knowledge as I did. In essence, in the article, I hadn’t explained myself well enough. As my mind turned back to those days in lockdown I realised that much of my limitation as a teacher revolved not around impatience or incompetence, but simply that I had assumed too much prior understanding on the part of my students. 

Share your experiences in the comments below if you have encountered this curse, either as someone communicating information or an audience member, struggling to understand the content being delivered.

Curious to see how to tackle the challenge of the curse of knowledge within data visualisation? Join our upcoming premium event (Thursday, February 23rd at 9am ET), where we will walk through a specific example, and intentionally curse ourselves with the knowledge of what it’s conveying before revealing how we can break that curse and build a compelling communication for our audience.