The Curse of Knowledge

Try This
Try this with a friend - using only your fingers, tap out the rhythm to five or six well known tunes - The Star Spangled Banner, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Jingle Bells, etc.     Have your friend write down the names of the tunes without giving them any hints or suggestions.    Once they have done that, write down your estimate of how many of the songs they got correct.   Compare notes.

The Problem
I recently finished reading "Made to Stick", an excellent book by Chip and Dan Heath on why some ideas seem to find traction while other ideas disappear.   The book references a Stanford study performed by Elizabeth Newton in 1990 which used a similar scenario and found a significant difference between the number of times the "tapper" thought the audience identified the song and the number of times the song actually was identified correctly.   Chip Heath refers to this as "The Curse of Knowledge".   Essentially, the more you know about a topic, the more difficult it is to communicate meaningfully about that topic to those less informed.    The knowledge you have seems so obvious that the audience is assumed to have it as well.     The audience, for their part, doesn't want to seem ignorant or naive and so rarely ask clarifying questions.

The Curse in Action
I have observed this phenomena a number of times in different situations: discussions at work between software developers and non-technical staff, car buffs describing their hot rod, and even Sunday morning sermons.   I've seen others do it, and I've participated myself in both presenter and audience roles.   In each case, the expert (the one talking) referenced concepts or things not familiar to the audience and thus presented an obstacle to knowledge transfer.    If I were to tell you that I had been studying the Gospels, you might not know what I was referencing if you were not brought up in a Christian home or had that faith as a component of your life.    To someone who had that life experience, however, they would immediately know that I had been studying the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.   In this example, "the Gospels" can be considered to be technical jargon - something that is already known to someone who possesses a level of knowledge about the topic but unfamiliar to those who do not.

The Solution
Like most problems, this is easily dealt with once identified and understood.   My approach to solving this problem is to avoid using technical terms, and using analogies  to relate the topic or idea to something else in the listener's realm of knowledge.    I find that although it takes slightly more time to explain something using this approach, the other person is able to understand the idea more readily.

Some would argue that I have thus not been contaminated with knowledge.   How do you share knowledge with others?