The Curse of Knowledge, a blunder that is often made when explaining something

In everyday life, sometimes we have a little difficulty in understanding something. Like we are confused about how to operate a tool, solve complex problems in homework, or find it difficult to understand an instruction in doing something.

This makes us ask people who understand more than us, whether it's people who have worked in that field for a long time or people who have expertise in that field. However, when they explain, their explanation is difficult or incomprehensible either because the intonation of their speech is too fast, the instructions are too complicated, or they are not clear in explaining something. At that time we will think or be considered that person we are stupid, even though their explanation did not reach us. Well, this situation is called the Curse of Knowledge.

The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias in which an individual feels he explains something clearly, clearly, and assumes that the recipient of the information has caught everything that has been explained.

Here is when the first person explains something to the second person, he assumes that the second person really understands the contents of the first person's brain, even though what happened was not like that. This is what ultimately makes information biased and not in accordance with the original and is categorized as cognitive bias.

Curse of Knowledge often occurs among people who have their own thoughts or people who tend to be geniuses where they usually spend their time thinking about things that are difficult for ordinary people to understand. Hence why geniuses are difficult for ordinary people to understand, even when they explain something. This happens because of differences in the systematic or flow of thought in the brain of each human being.

The simplest example is during a football match. When the coach gives instructions to the players on the field, sometimes the players are difficult to understand so that the team suffers a loss.

As Ronald Koeman did to Oscar Mingueza in Week 31 of La Liga last season when Barcelona played Getafe. Oscar was pulled out by Koeman because he considered playing too attacking. Even though the team was vulnerable and Oscar was told to defend, the opposite happened. As a result it made Koeman angry and pulled out Oscar in the 75th minute.

Another example is when we are told to buy something at the shop when we are small. Especially if the items purchased are quite a lot and are not given a note. As a result we buy the wrong things and get angry from our parents.

So in conclusion, is the curse of knowledge bad? You could say yes and you could say no. It depends on the context we are dealing with. For example, we want to explain something to someone and hope that person will understand but we explain something that cannot be absorbed by our discussion partner, then it will have bad results.

On the other hand, if we are in a team, for example, and we are facing an enemy, we can use this cognitive bias as a psywar or inducement as if we are stupid and the enemy will look down on us and seem to know more than us, even though we already have other strategies. As Mao Zedong said:

We often think too narrowly, like the frog at the bottom of the well who thinks the sky is only as big as the hole at the top of the well. If the frog had come to the surface, he would have seen a different scene