q13345

Knowledge is humanity’s greatest asset. The ability to acquire it – to process abstract concepts, to understand and look for the most logical solution to a conundrum – is what sets us apart from our feral planet-mates. But (Morpheus from //The Matrix’s// voice) what if I told you… that it can also be a curse? Mind not blown yet? Well, please allow me to explain, dear reader. In 1990, Elizabeth Newton, then a Grad student at Stanford University in California, published a study illustrated this “curse” by playing a simple game: there are two groups, the tappers and the listeners. The Tappers tap out a tune with their fingers on a table, and the listeners had to guess what song they were playing. They weren’t difficult songs, either; the majority of the time they were holiday tunes, or popular at the time radio hits (this was 1990, so think Nirvana and Digital Underground). The tappers, in a survey before the study took place, guessed that the listeners would get it right at least 50% of the time, or 60 of the total 120 total times it was done. How many times did they guess correctly? 20, perhaps? That would be a generous guess. The listeners got the song right //three times// out of a total of 120 different songs played. Why were the Tappers so confident that they would guess correctly? Well, as the article says: “When a tapper taps, it is impossible for her to avoid hearing the tune playing along to her taps. Meanwhile, all the listener can hear is a kind of bizarre Morse code. Yet the tappers were flabbergasted by how hard the listeners had to work to pick up the tune.  The problem is that once we know something—say, the melody of a song—we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. We have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can’t readily re-create their state of mind.” (Heath 2006)
 * __The Curse of Knowledge__**

The article goes on to illustrate this with the slogans many companies use to motivate their employees: “Achieving customer delight!” “Become an efficient manufacturer”, etc. These “vague strategies” are written by a company’s executives, people who’ve had years of immersion in the company and know the ins and outs of how the company works. To quote the article:  “Top executives have had years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in their heads. But frontline employees, who aren’t privy to the underlying meaning, hear only opaque phrases. As a result, the strategies being touted don’t stick. ” (Heath 2006)  Knowledge: a double-edged sword. =Works Cited= Heath, Chip and Dan. //The Curse of Knowledge.// December 2006. http://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge/ar/1.