The Curse of Knowledge

The more you know, the harder it is to explain.

Have you heard of the Curse of Knowledge? It’s the concept that, the more you know about a subject, the more you overestimate how much other people also know about it.

This makes it more difficult to communicate clearly with a layman who doesn’t know anything about your topic of expertise.

Jargon is an obvious example - when you use the acronyms and jargon words that are really familiar to you in your sphere of work and forget that the average person has no idea what they mean.

(Healthcare is a good/bad example of this - aside from the thousands of acronyms used, how many people limp around the hospital looking for the x-ray department because they don’t know what radiology means?).

Too little info

Charity comms is full of examples of the Curse of Knowledge, and it’s a great reason to get someone in from outside your organisation to take a look at your communications.

Get an external copywriter to read through your web copy or planned fundraising campaign. They will tell you if there’s anything that isn’t clear or they don’t really understand. You might get feedback like:

“What’s The Pear Project? You haven’t explained that.”

“Where’s Burkina Faso?”

“What’s this organisation WJURM that you’ve dropped in here? Never heard of it.”

“What do you mean by ‘policy research’? What is that, exactly?”

Too much info

The other side of the curse is that the ‘expert’ can put in far too many irrelevant details that the reader doesn’t really need to know in order to follow the story and act.

As a charity you can develop an internal culture where you must namecheck every worker and project vaguely related to what you’re talking about. But this isn’t of interest to the reader. In fact, too much info creates confusion and kills the momentum of your communication.

If you’ve fallen into this habit, you’ll hear:

“Who are Dave and Sandra? What do they have to do with this?”

“Do I really need to know the names of all these schools? Just ‘local schools’ would be fine and less distracting.”

Sometimes, the less you know about a topic, the better placed you are to communicate it to the general public. We recommend you escape the Curse of Knowledge with an outside pair of eyes!

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For more help, just contact our jargon-busting team!