Only Familiar Information is a “Curse”: Children’s Ability to Predict What Their Peers Know

Abstract

The ability to make inferences about what one’s peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one’s knowledge when reasoning about others’ knowledge, in children’s estimates of their peers’ knowledge. Four‐ to 7‐year‐olds were taught the answers to factual questions and estimated how many peers would know the answers. When children learned familiar answers, they showed a curse of knowledge in their peer estimates. But, when children learned unfamiliar answers to the same questions, they did not show a curse of knowledge. These data shed light on the mechanisms underlying perspective taking, supporting a fluency misattribution account of the curse of knowledge.

Hindsight bias and false-belief reasoning from preschool to old age.

“…Also, hindsight bias was greater in older adults than in 10to 17-year-olds. This U-shaped data pattern conceptually replicates prior work that used a smaller age range with smaller samples, often using general-knowledge tasks focusing on childhood or adulthood (e.g., Bayen et al, 2006;Bernstein, Erdfelder, et al, 2011;Ghrear et al, 2020Ghrear et al, , 2021Groß & Pachur, 2019;Pohl et al, 2010Pohl et al, , 2018. False-belief reasoning errors were significant in all age groups but did not differ with age.…”

Irrelevant information enhances a sense of knowledge and curses our understanding of other minds.

“…The given answers were thought to discount the participants' own performance in estimating the commonality of knowledge. Ghrear et al (2021) argue that unfamiliar answers to difficult questions may elicit a sense of surprisingness, which decreases processing fluency and reduces the tendency to anchor estimates to such answers. Tullis (2018) argues that in addition to their own knowledge as anchor, individuals make use of a variety of metacognitive cues to estimate others' knowledge.…”

“…Past studies on the curse of knowledge and hindsight bias have used both between- (e.g., von der Beck et al, 2019) and within-subject designs (e.g., Ghrear et al, 2021). Newman et al (2015) argue that within-subject conditions allow for internal comparison of fluency levels and are thus more sensitive to effects than between-subject conditions.…”

“…These manipulations are assumed to increase retrieval fluency by evoking a context for decision-making rich in semantic relatedness to the target stimuli. If fluent processing is misattributed to the objective ease of the information as proposed by Birch et al (2017) and Ghrear et al (2021), then estimation of both peer and own knowledge should be inflated. Given this background, the first aim of the present study is to confirm the effect of semantic relatedness on estimation of peer and own knowledge in one study, by manipulating the availability of topic-related but irrelevant background information.…”

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“…This arrangement provides another way to put students front-and-center in the design of their courses as they witness student-centered instruction being modeled for them (Burns & Mitzberg, 2019). Additionally, involving learners in lesson planning and teaching can have other benefits, including the fact that students may have better understandings of what their peers know and do not know (Ghrear et al, 2021;Pinker, 2014). Pinker called this the "curse of knowledge," i.e., the way people's own knowledge, such as lecturers' knowledge, causes difficulty in understanding what others, such as students, might or might not know.…”