The Curse of Knowledge
Welcome to Professional Ignorance Week, Episode #1. (Dubious name. It gets better.)
Last month’s article on Professional Ignorance generated a lot of mail. One reader wrote simply, “We felt seen.” That inspired this three-parter, a deeper dive, with each article a little longer than usual.
Let’s start with the basics: a problem and an antidote.
We’ve all worked on at least one: an amazing new exhibition … that our visitors don’t understand. Physically, it’s beautiful. Content-wise, it’s extremely accurate and complete, but so much so that it’s inaccessible to most. Dense. Academic.
The cause? Often, a well-known cognitive pattern: the curse of knowledge. (Also known as expert-novice gap, expert blind spot, or loss of beginner’s mind.)
The curse of knowledge: once experts know something, they struggle to imagine not knowing it. They assume others share their knowledge.
For exhibition teams, these experts are our vitally important scientists, historians, and other subject-matter experts (SMEs). Their knowledge is a blessing. Their curse of knowledge is a side effect.
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So, what might be an antidote? Let’s begin with our visitors.
Our visitors start with a lack of knowledge about the subject.
But our subject-matter experts — by definition — start with the very opposite.
Hm.
Here’s where it gets interesting: the starting position of the rest of the exhibition team (designers, developers, writers) is almost always much closer to that of the visitors.
In fact, the non-SME members of the exhibition team might even possess a unique asset they don’t realize they have: professional ignorance of the subject matter.
Their professional ignorance is an “anti-curse-of-knowledge” position. It enables them to bridge the expert-novice gap automatically. They simply act as a proxy for the visitor, in direct dialogue with the SME.
Therefore, professional ignorance is a resource, not a shortcoming. It is disciplined curiosity with natural limits. In fact, for a non-SME exhibition team member to learn too much might make them less useful, not more.
Here’s the thing:
Professional ignorance isn’t a shortcoming. It’s a skill, an antidote for the curse of knowledge.
Are exhibition teams the only “anti-curse-of-knowledge” profession? Nope! Next time: the sister professions we didn’t know we had.
Warmly,
Jonathan
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MtM Word of the Day:
Curse of knowledge. A cognitive bias that comes with expertise. Once experts know something, they struggle to imagine not knowing it, and assume others share their knowledge. This can lead museum subject-matter experts to inadvertently overestimate visitors' baseline knowledge.
