Made to Stick

the Curse of Knowledge: The Curse of Knowledge concept comes from 
C. F. Camerer, G. Loewenstein, and M. Weber, “The Curse of Knowledge in
Economic Settings: An Experimental Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy
97 (1989): 1232–54. The Curse of Knowledge increases as people gain more
expertise. Pamela Hinds asked experts (salespeople at a cellular company) to
N O T E S

---

predict how long novice cell-phone users would take to learn to perform var-
ious tasks (e.g., storing a greeting on voice mail or saving some messages and
deleting others). Experts dramatically underestimated the amount of time it
would take novice users to accomplish the tasks (i.e., they estimated that it
would take thirteen minutes to perform functions that actually took thirty-
three minutes), and their estimates did not improve when they were specifi-
cally asked to think about the problems they encountered while they were
originally learning. See Pamela J. Hinds, “The Curse of Expertise: The Ef-
fects of Expertise and Debiasing Methods on Predicting Novice Perfor-
mance,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 5 (1999): 205–21. See
also brilliant work in psychology by Boas Keysar, Linda E. Ginzel, and Max
H. Bazerman, “States of Affairs and States of Mind: The Effect of Knowledge
on Beliefs,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 64
(1995): 283–93. Ironically, the Curse of Knowledge has been well docu-
mented in economic and market settings, where people should have the
greatest incentives to try to overcome it (see http://curse-of-knowledge
.behaviouralfinance.net/). If you can’t overcome the Curse of Knowledge
when it’s costing you lots of money, it’s going to be even harder to detect and
overcome it in day-to-day situations.
19