Lift This Curse (from your communication)
When he was 11 years old, future actor Alan Alda posed a question to his teacher.
“What’s a flame?”
She paused, then answered “Oxidation.”
This perfect example of a factually correct —yet utterly unhelpful— answer stuck with him for decades.
After M*A*S*H, Alda went on to host the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers. And following years and years of televised conversations with scientists to help the public better understand science, he went to work helping the scientists communicate better with people outside their field.
In 2009, he co-founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. And then in 2012 the flame came back in The Flame Challenge, a contest asking scientists around the world to explain what a flame is in a way a kid could understand, as judged by kids. You can see the winner for yourself.
Our human brains are great in a lot of ways. We love feeling smart about it, too. Unfortunately, many built-in human brain shortcuts for survival are mismatched to the modern world, making it harder to deal with people and information in the present day. Wayward shortcuts show up as pesky cognitive biases that can lead to very bad outcomes.
Experts are cursed and everyone suffers
You may be familiar with the Greek myth of Cassandra, the Trojan priestess gifted by the god Apollo with true prophecy, but cursed never to be believed when she spoke it. Well, unless you’re careful, your own learning about any topic will curse you with stubborn ignorance about other people that can be just as frustrating and consequential.
Whenever we learn things — any of us, about any subject — we lose the sense of what it was like not to know those things. This is the “curse of knowledge.” The more you know, the more you expect other people to know. If you become a true expert in a topic, forget it. You will, in fact, totally forget what it’s like to lack basic concepts.
(The curse of knowledge was popularized in a 1989 Journal of Political Economy article by economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber. Information asymmetry is a big topic in economics because having more information can give one party in a transaction a significant advantage. It shifts the balance of power.)
Assuming your audience knows as much as you do, or assuming anything at all based on your own experience, makes it harder for you to understand their perspective and predict their behavior. And this makes you a very bad communicator. And less likely to achieve your goals if your goals require you to influence someone else’s behavior. You will inadvertently make other people feel stupid when you’re most concerned with feeling smart yourself. And that’s when those other people stop listening.
It’s easy to blame non-experts for believing non-facts, but that’s just a way those of us who love learning let ourselves off the hook. As consultants, we’ve been in a lot of rooms working to get smart people to accept the importance of making their instructions, their marketing, even their survey questions, more intelligible. And we’ve met a lot of resistance.
Why is the curse so powerful?
There are three big barriers to communicating across experience and expertise. For one, it is actually hard, nuanced and effortful. Knowing a thing and knowing how to communicate about a thing or teach a thing are totally different skills even if they don’t feel like the should be. Conflating ignorance with unintelligence leads to arrogance, and no one is going to listen to anyone condescending to them. If only it were as simple as summarizing, which it isn’t. (For fun, try running text through a readability analyzer. Eye opening.)
Because it’s a cognitive bias, you may never even realize it’s happening, especially if you mostly associate directly with people who share your knowledge and perspectives. We once worked with a healthcare organization that produced patient information they’d never reviewed with anyone but a panel of medical specialists. The instructions were technically accurate, but impenetrable. Patient nonadherence, as it’s now called, is very common, and that project gave us some insight into why.
And, as with many similar situations, status comes into play. Experts resist changing their communication style because they’re afraid their peers will think less of them. (And there can be real career penalties in academia.) Or it might feel like hard-won knowledge has less value if it becomes easier to gain. For people with a lot of success in one area, it can be difficult to admit they lack sufficient skill in another. What’s effective for other audiences might be mighty uncomfortable.
Three keys to breaking the curse
Because everything comes in threes, here are the keys to overcoming the curse.
Know your goal, in terms of behavior and outcomes
“Informing” is not enough. You need to be clear how you want the behavior of your various audiences to change based on what you’re telling them. And explicitly list any other outcomes you hope or expect to see in the world. Otherwise, you will never know to what extent you’ve succeeded.
Be interested in your audience and listen to them
If you want real people to care about, understand, and even act on what you have to say, you need to be genuinely enthusiastic about hearing from them first. Shut up and listen before you try to inform or influence. There is no way around this. Otherwise you will stay cursed forever. As Dale Carnegie famously said "become genuinely interested in other people." Experts with facts on their side hate to be told they’re in sales. And then the liars who are good at sales get all the attention.
Seek feedback, not approval
Remain ready to find out how you’re missing the mark, always and forever. As you develop your perspective and your skills, cultivating the right attitude will ensure you learn the difference between useful feedback and those superficial reactions that make you feel a certain way. It’s the only way to get better instead of doing more of the same.
And next time you see someone online (or in your work chat) complaining about anyone being ignorant, take a moment to think about how far empathy goes in creating a healthier information ecosystem.
A version of this post appeared in the Mule newsletter.
