Jeanne Robertson was an athlete, comedian, and all-around good person. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak several years ago. I think her most famous story is the “seven-up” pound cake story. I’ll summarize it here, but do yourself a favor and look it up online. She tells the story of how she would routinely make these cakes for the families of people who have had a member recently pass away. She needed to make one in a hurry once and she left a note for her husband to get to the grocery store and come home with the ingredients. She was shocked to learn that her husband came home with enough ingredients to make quite a few cakes, not just one. The reason for this? She had decided to number the list she gave him. Each item was numbered from one to seven. But her husband thought those numbers meant a quantity of things to get instead of a way to list the items. The way she tells the story is priceless.
How many times have you messed something up that your spouse wanted you to do but you thought you were doing right? The answer for me is quite often. This happens with children a lot too. Maybe they are learning to do a new household chore, and when you leave them to it, they decide on a completely different way of getting the task done. We have found dishes in strange locations in the kitchen as a result of this. The differences arise because other people don’t have the experience that we have in doing that certain task.
Elizabeth Newton, a PhD student in Stanford University in 1990 created an experiment to test this. It’s called the “tapping experiment.” I like this one a lot because you don’t need any special equipment or know-how to perform it. All you need is some people (at least a couple but more is better). In this experiment a “tapper” was selected to come up with a selection of songs. These songs had to be known by everyone else, but the tapper was not to reveal what they were to anyone. Then for each song he or she would tap out the rhythm of the melody. It was the other people’s job to guess what song was being tapped. Before any of the tapping began the “tappers” were asked how many songs they thought their friends would correctly guess. For her experiment the tappers thought that about half of the songs would be guessed ahead of time. But when the experiment was conducted, the friends only guessed correctly in about one in forty tries.
What was going on? The tappers thought that so many songs would be guessed correctly because they had the foreknowledge. They could hear the whole song in their heads as they tapped. But the others didn’t know ahead of time what the songs were. No melody was ringing in their heads.
There is a term for this condition. It is called the Curse of Knowledge. It can be summed up pretty well like this. Once we know something it can be difficult to imagine not knowing it. It is hard to take the perspective of someone who doesn’t have the same understanding as we do. So we make bad assumptions about what others will do.
It becomes harder for experts to teach others. It can be harder to communicate ideas. It also makes it tough to predict the behavior of others. What might be obvious decisions to you may not be so obvious to a person learning how to do something new. The curse of knowledge can also make it harder for us to understand the decisions we have made in the past. “Why did I ever think that was a good idea?” you might ask.
We do this with the bible don’t we?
We almost can’t help ourselves. We read the bible from a future perspective. We know the ending, but the people in the stories don’t. Take Adam and Eve for example. “Don’t eat that fruit!” you might be saying. “Don’t you know what will happen?” Well according to the story they might not have known. The story only says that Adam was told he would die if he ate from the forbidden tree (and did Adam even know what death was at that point?). There was no mention of Eve. And there was also no mention of being thrown out of the garden or living a life of toil and hardship. We know what happens as a consequence so it is easy to think badly of the original couple.
What about Jonah?
Jonah 1:1-3
The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”
3 But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.
Silly little Jonah we say. But we only say that because we know the rest of the story. Would you have done any differently than he if you were put in his place?
How do we deal with the curse of knowledge? In bible study try to read passages as if it were the first time. Put yourself there. What would you do in that situation, not knowing what was to happen? I guarantee you will gain a new perspective.
In other aspects of life, try to slow down your communication with a learner and avoid any assumptions that are based on your understanding. It is all about putting yourself in their shoes. What are they probably thinking? How can I help someone without bias?
Let’s look at one more example.
Joshua 6:2-5
2 Then the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. 3 March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. 4 Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. 5 When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the army will go up, everyone straight in.”
Joshua was asked to do a pretty amazing thing as he approached Jericho. Put yourself in his place. Is this how you bring the enemy walls down? Would you have done what he did? To me that is a tough sell. But the real miracle of this story, more than falling walls, is the fact that Joshua immediately obeyed God even when the commandment didn’t make any sense. This is what makes the story so remarkable, and you can begin to see that when you remove the curse of knowledge and really get into the wonder of these stories.
God Bless