You Don't Know What You Do Know: The Curse of Knowledge in Cognition and Teaching

Abstract

The curse of knowledge refers to the common experience of having difficulty setting aside one’s own knowledge when inferring the knowledge of others. Within heuristics and biases research, the curse of knowledge is discussed as a bias arising from the availability, anchoring, and adjustment heuristics, and is conceptually analogous to hindsight bias towards one’s past self. Within theory-of-mind literature, the curse is discussed as a failure to employ mature mentalizing skills, though there lacks consensus on the conceptual relationship between mechanisms driving the curse and those driving theory-of-mind. This paper seeks to bridge the gap between the the heuristics and biases and theory-of-mind approaches by proposing an integrated cognitive mechanism underlying the curse of knowledge. Implications for teachers, strategies for combatting the curse in the classroom, and ideas for future research are discussed.