Why Does Knowing the Answer Hide a Beginner’s Difficulty?

An experienced user explaining a piece of software may say, “Just click that button in the top-right corner.” To them, the button's location, icon and next step are obvious. A beginner may not even know which window “top-right” refers to. The problem is not necessarily impatience. The instructor can no longer easily subtract what they already know.

This bias is called the curse of knowledge. Classic research found that people with private information allow it to influence their predictions of an uninformed person's judgement, even when they have reason to be accurate. Knowledge changes which cues stand out, which steps become bundled into automatic units and what we assume others should know. The experienced person is not merely forgetting one sentence; they are estimating the novice from a task representation already reorganised by learning.

This is not quite the false-consensus effect. False consensus involves overestimating how many others share our opinions or choices. The curse of knowledge concerns our own information contaminating a judgement of someone else's knowledge state. Nor does it mean experts must be worse teachers. Expertise provides accurate content and more strategies, but it does not automatically make an explanation begin from the learner's available cues.

Experiments published in 2022 further showed that the bias in predicting others' knowledge varies with judgement conditions and available cues, while its precise mechanism remains unsettled. “Take their perspective” is therefore not a guaranteed cure. A more concrete check is to let a real beginner attempt the task, observe where they stop, and restore the intermediate states that expertise has compressed away. The conclusion is not that knowledge is harmful. Knowledge changes the observer's starting point, and communication needs external feedback to recalibrate it.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/261651
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794110/