My parents recently told me about a conflict between their neighbors. The neighbors across the street have a dog that spends a lot of time outside in the yard, including when they are gone all day at work. Whenever the owners left, the dog would bark all day, which was annoying for nearby households and probably not great for the dog either. Two of my parents’ other neighbors decided they would call the police or animal control, since the neighbors with the dog did not seem to have put any effort into getting the dog to stop barking. When they told my parents about this plan, my mom asked them if the dog owners even knew about the dog’s daily barking, given that the dog did not seem to bark most of the time that the owners were home, to which they replied “Of course they do! The dog is barking when they get home!”. My parents pointed out the neighbors might just think that the dog is barking because his owners are coming home, and that they should talk to the neighbors before calling the authorities. It turns out the dog owners had no idea about the problem, were horribly embarrassed, and were willing to put in extremes of effort to solve the problem and make things right, including hiring an expert to train the dog, installing a more private fence, and baking cookies for every household affected by the problem.
The curse of knowledge happens when you no longer remember what it is like to not know something. This is especially a problem in writing and speaking, since people tend to assume that their audience shares more background on the topic than they actually do. I gave a talk during grad school which I had tried to make as accessible to other physicists as possible, and which I thought might be a little too hand-holding. Nonetheless, during my practice talk one of my friends stopped me to ask what Te was. My instinctive reaction was “obviously that’s the electron temperature what else could it be?”, but what I actually said was something like “That’s the electron temperature, thanks for point that out”. What I should have said is “That’s the electron temperature, which we use because <explain what electron temperature is>. Should I explain that in the talk?”. It is extremely difficult to know when you’re afflicted by the curse of knowledge, to the point Steven Pinker suggests the only way to combat it is to get someone else to look at your work and tell you if you’re assuming too much background knowledge for your audience.
I think something similar happens in contexts other than writing. My parents’ neighbors knew that the other neighbor’s dog was barking, to them a fact about the world so obvious that nobody in the neighborhood could possibly miss it. But not everyone knows the things we know, even people who share much of our experience, and even for facts that seem obvious to us. The dog’s owners were not too thoughtless or lazy to solve the barking problem. They just weren’t aware of it.
I suspect that the curse of knowledge is partially responsible for accusations of “willful ignorance” that are commonly aimed at people who are not fully on board with one’s own political agenda. What happens is Alice will invoke a stereotype or misconception that is commonly known as a stereotype or misconception by Bob and Bob’s community, then Bob accuses Alice of either lying or being willfully ignorant of the stereotype/misconception. For example, just now I did a search on Twitter for the string ‘willful ignorance’, and I found a bunch of people accusing each other of being willfully ignorant because they are acting on different information about the pandemic. Once you “know” that mask wearing is a social good, it is very hard to remember what it was like before you or anyone else knew this, or what it is like to live in a very different information bubble.
This can also happen when we assume that everyone knows what we do about a social situation. When I was in maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, we had a Valentine’s Day activity where we decorated the bags for our classmates to put candy and cards in, and for some reason I was put in charge of coming up with ‘awards’ for all the bags. One of my classmates had what was to me clearly the highest-effort, most beautiful Valentine’s bag, so I thought it would be funny to give it the “most ugly bag” award, since everyone knows it was the best bag. But nobody wants to receive such an award, this went over horribly, and I had to make a panicked (and admittedly somewhat frustrated) explanation to my teacher about how I only did it because it was so obvious, upon inspection of all the bags, that it was actually the best one. The curse of knowledge was not the only thing that went wrong here. I also just made an awful social judgement and did not understand that my subjective judgement about beauty was not an objective fact about the world that anyone can see. But I do think that my failure to remember what it was like to not have seen all the bags and know that one really stood out above the others was probably necessary for this failing.
I don’t think that in any of these cases the only cause of the conflict was the curse of knowledge, and I think typically something else has to go wrong, like interpreting other’s actions uncharitably or failing to find out why someone did something that seems so awful before treating them as an awful person. However, I do think that conflict is harder to avoid when we think others must know something that they in fact do not know, and I think it is easier than most people realize to find ourselves in such a situation.
Underconfidence 