The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that causes people to fail to understand the attitude and behaviour of those who do not have as much knowledge of the subject as them. Coaches can very easily fall into the trap of this bias if they are not aware of it and don’t empathise with the client.
For example, the curse of knowledge can mean that an expert in some field might struggle to teach beginners. This is because the expert intuitively assumes that things that are obvious to them are also obvious to the beginners. This may not be the case. For coaches or therapists it may mean that they fail to spend adequate time in teaching the techniques, or the frameworks to their clients.
In addition to making it difficult for some experts to teach beginners, the curse of knowledge can negatively influence people in other ways, such as by making it harder for them to communicate effectively, predict other people’s behavior, and understand their own past behavior.
You can reduce the curse of knowledge in various ways. These include increasing your understanding and awareness of this bias, identifying the perspectives involved and the differences between them, getting feedback from relevant individuals. Using general debiasing techniques, such as slowing down the reasoning process also helps.
You can also use these techniques to reduce other people’s curse of knowledge. You can benefit from accounting for this bias even if you don’t reduce it, such as when predicting people’s teaching ability.
Curated from https://effectiviology.com/curse-of-knowledge/
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