One Wedding and Two Curses (Bonus: 18 Book Recommendations)
How asymmetry of information can create an empathy gap, and how naming things can help you see them
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a wedding. It was a beautiful celebration of love, family and friendship. An ode to life.
Two details struck me — one during the ceremony, and one during the dinner. Concepts discovered in business books made me pay attention to anecdotal moments that probably no-one else will remember from this wedding.
The Curse of Knowledge
Let’s start with the dinner. The newlyweds have a reputation of being fond of cinema, so their friends had organized a fun game to test movie-wisdom. The friends would tell a story, and every now and then, a line that would actually be a quote from a famous movie, which the couple would have to find.
The game started, and at the first quote, there was a floating moment. The quizzed couple had no idea about the movie it was extracted from… which was a major surprise for their friends.
— That’s the easiest one!
— If you can’t find this one, it’s gonna be hard to continue…
Champagne and emotional drain were offered as explanations for the cluelessness of the bride and the groom. I saw something else at play: the curse of knowledge.
I discovered the curse of knowledge concept in a book called Made To Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The book is brilliant in many respects, but let’s focus on the curse of knowledge, which goes like this: once we know something, it is hard to remember what it was like not to know it.
In other words, learning something erases the state of mind that existed before the learning happened. Your brain digests the new knowledge and makes it part of your new self. It’s so well integrated that you feel like it has always been obvious to you — and to anyone else, for that matter.
That’s the trap. By forgetting your own ignorance, you are likely to make the assumption that this information is shared by everyone. You may fail to realize that this assumption is false, and that a logical deduction made from that implicit piece of knowledge will not resonate with others.
During the movie quiz, the information gap was clear: the friends knew the movie title, the couple didn’t.
When you don’t know the movie, you hear the quote in a very flat way. It’s just a bunch of words that you are trying to match with thousands of potential movies. A word like “fire” can be a reference to a dragon, a gun, an arsonist, a race, a danger, etc. The list of options is endless, because you don’t have any context or clear criteria.
When you know the movie, you listen to the quote in a different way. You can picture the scene, the characters, the actors, the tone, the context, the references, etc. For example, because of the information you have, words carry no ambiguity — if you know the movie is Top Gun, the word “fire” is likely to be a reference to a plane’s engine. The quote looks like the last remaining piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It’s impossible to miss!
Like any cognitive bias, knowing about the curse of knowledge doesn’t make you immune to it. However, it does help you spot it more rapidly and adjust accordingly. When you’re explaining something to someone and see cluelessness in their eyes, it is probably because you have (wrongly) assumed that they possessed pieces of underlying knowledge. Instead of repeating what you just said, try to discover what foundational knowledge they need to acquire before being able to understand what you wanted to share.
The Curse of Simplicity
Earlier in the wedding, another curse made its way to the ceremony. Many eloquent speakers had shared their funny, touching and informative perspectives about the hosts of the day. It was time for the groom and the bride to express their vows.
As the bride was listing the numerous qualities of her soon-to-be husband, she mentioned the following:
Often, I am touched by your kindness. I look at you, and I see all those invisible things, all those acts of pure kindness for everyone around you. You don't ask for anything, you devote yourself to others in the softest manner, without showing off. I would like you to know that I see all these things and that they touch me.
Those words overwhelmed me with emotion. To me, with this observation, she was breaking the all-too-common curse of simplicity.
Ken Segall introduced me to the concept of curse of simplicity in his book Insanely Simple. He describes it like this: What looks effortless requires hard work. That’s the curse of simplicity — it looks deceptively simple.
In the context of the book, the curse of simplicity is a reference to product design work. When you work in that field, once you understand the paradox described, you see it everywhere. To be accurate, what you see everywhere is how people struggle to cope up with this curse. People claim to aim for simplicity but they crave for recognition too. If producing something beautifully simple will deprive you from others seeing how hard you worked, you are likely to produce something more complicated.
(I’m not blaming anyone. Ego is part of human psyche, and I’m no exception.)
What is the remedy for that? The only one I found is to praise the invisible work. When you see someone who managed to both do something great AND hide the amount of work behind it, tell the person how impressed you are by such a prowess. Because no-one else will. Don’t take simple solutions for granted — ask their makers for stories about what happened backstage, so they can have their moment of glory too. Act like this bride who, after a decade-long of a relationship, still notices all the invisible things and mentions them.
Twin Curses
Before this wedding, I never thought about the relationships between those two curses. I didn’t see how similar they were. In both cases, an asymmetry of information makes it difficult for one person to relate with what the another person is going through. However, the asymmetry direction differs — in the curse of knowledge, it’s the excess of information that blocks the empathy, while in the curse of simplicity, it’s the absence of information that blocks it.
Of course, you must be wondering why would someone pay attention to such intellectual concepts during a wedding, the pinacle of emotional moments?
I wish I knew. I must be suffering from another type of curse, but I didn’t come across its name yet. Any ideas?
Unrelated, here are some lovely books I read over the past months:
Into The Forest, novel by Jean Hegland, 1996.
The Psychology of Money, essay by Morgan Housel, 2020.
The Shawshank Redemption and Rita Hayworth, novel by Stephen King, 1982.
Cubed, essay by Ernő Rubik, 2020.
Children of Disaster trilogy, novels by Pierre Lemaitre, 2013-2020.
The Manual, essay by Epictetus, 125.
Fresh Water for Flowers, novel by Valérie Perrin, 2018.
Zen in the Art of Archery, essay by Eugen Herrigel, 1948.
Project Hail Mary, novel by Andy Weir, 2021.
Robinson Crusoe, novel by William Defoe, 1719.
War Chief, essay by Louis Saillans, 2021.
The Flanders Panel, novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 1990.
Ender’s Game, novel by Orson Scott Card, 1985.
Queen To Play, novel by Bertina Henrichs, 2005.
Captive, essay by Clara Rojas, 2010.
Us, novel by David Nicholls, 2014.
Any recommendations for share? What books did you really enjoy recently?