Yes, sometimes I get deeply thoughtful about stuff like that. Not kidding.
So currently I am reading Made to Stick and this is an excerpt from the brilliant book on the curse of knowledge (it is easy to follow, I promise;-) And also since I am in the mood to throw this stuff at you, you got no choice.):
In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a PhD in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: "tappers" or "listeners". Tappers received a list of 25 well-known songs such as "Happy Birthday to You" and "The Star Spangled Banner." Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener's job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (By the way, this experiment is fun to try at home if there's a good "listener" candidate nearby)
The listener's job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of Newton's experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5% of the songs: 3 out of 120.
But here's what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50%.
The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?
When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it yourself - tap out "The Star Spangled Banner". It's impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can't hear the tune - all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.
In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn't the song obvious? The tappers' expressions, when a listener guesses "Happy Birthday to You" for "The Star Spangled Banner," are priceless. How could you be so stupid?
It's hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. When they're tapping they can't imagine what it's like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song.
This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it is like not to know it.
2 comments:
i found your blog while looking for a blog i used to follow years ago... it was a nice find, although i doubt that u're the same manju! :)
i think what u wrote is very interesting, i debate about this with friends sometimes... what it's like for people who don't have the same knowledge i do - here in brazil this is critical, with high rates of illiteracy and people who just simply don't care.
as i usually say, ignorance is bliss, dumb people don't carry that curse, they just live content with what they have and what they know.
Hi Lilize, glad you found my blog accidentally :)
Ignorance definitely is bliss in this age, specially since we are all overloaded with information from so many sources..Internet and other media. It becomes extremely tough then to share this knowledge with someone who has no idea about it. We find it hard to imagine how it was like not to know it=)
Take the example of Apple. Most of its products are extremely complex in their making but they are abstracted to the most simple interface.
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