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Why Smart People Misunderstand Each Other
29 August 2026 by Ed Freitas
The Curse of Knowledge
Have you ever explained something that seemed perfectly clear, only to be met with a blank expression?
You explain it again, perhaps using a little more detail, but the other person still doesn't quite get it. Eventually, you start wondering how something so obvious can be so difficult to understand.
The problem might not be the other person's intelligence or willingness to listen. It could simply be something called the Curse of Knowledge.
The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for us to remember what it was like before we understood something. Once we know a subject well, we tend to assume that other people know more about it than they actually do.
In other words, once we know something, it becomes surprisingly difficult to imagine not knowing it.
The Tappers and Listeners Experiment
One of the best examples of the Curse of Knowledge comes from a simple experiment involving songs.
People were divided into two groups: tappers and listeners. The tappers chose familiar songs, such as Happy Birthday, and tapped the rhythm on a table. The listeners then had to identify the song from the tapping alone.
Before the experiment, the tappers expected the listeners to correctly identify around half of the songs.
In reality, the listeners identified only about 2.5 percent of them.
The reason for the difference is quite simple. While tapping, the tappers could hear the complete song in their heads. They could hear the melody, the rhythm, and perhaps even the lyrics. To them, the answer seemed obvious.
The listeners, however, heard nothing more than a series of disconnected taps on a table.
The tappers could not mentally remove the information they already possessed. They heard a song, while everyone else heard tapping.
How This Happens at Work
The same thing happens in the workplace all the time.
A manager asks a new employee to follow the "usual process," forgetting that the employee has never seen that process before.
A technical specialist explains a problem using acronyms that are completely familiar to the engineering team but mean very little to the customer.
A senior employee leaves several steps out of an explanation because those steps have become automatic after years of experience.
A leader announces a new strategy and assumes everyone understands its importance because the leadership team has already spent several months discussing it.
In each of these cases, the person speaking hears the entire song. Everyone else hears only the tapping.
This can create unnecessary frustration on both sides. The speaker believes the message was perfectly clear, while the listener may feel confused, excluded, or reluctant to ask what appears to be an "obvious" question.
Expertise Can Make Communication More Difficult
We often assume that the person who knows the most about a subject will automatically be the best person to explain it. That isn't always the case.
As we gain experience, we start combining several ideas into a single mental step. We stop noticing the individual connections because they have become automatic to us.
A beginner cannot make those jumps yet.
This doesn't mean experts are poor communicators. It simply means that expertise creates a blind spot that good communicators need to manage deliberately.
The more experienced we become, the more important it is to reconstruct the path that brought us to that understanding and avoid assuming that everyone else started from the same place.
Breaking the Curse
One useful change is to stop asking, "Does that make sense?"
Most people will say yes, even when the real answer is "not entirely," "I think so," or "I don't want to look foolish by asking."
Instead, ask questions such as: "How would you explain this to someone else?" "What do you see as the next step?" or "Which part is still unclear?"
These questions test the message rather than the person.
It also helps to provide context before instructions. Don't explain only what someone needs to do. Explain why it matters, what a successful result looks like, and how that person's work connects to the larger objective.
Finally, pay attention to words such as "obviously," "simply," and "as everyone knows." If something were genuinely obvious to everyone, it probably wouldn't need to be explained.
Good communication is not measured by how clear something sounds inside our own heads. It is measured by what the other person can understand and act upon.
So, the next time someone doesn't understand your explanation, don't simply repeat it more loudly or add more technical detail. Pause and ask yourself: what can I hear in my head that they cannot?
Because effective communication is not about tapping harder. It is about helping the other person hear the song.