Find a genuine novice to test your explanation on
Before the real audience, explain to someone who actually doesn’t know.
Why it works
Imagining a novice perspective is unreliable because the expert’s knowledge is always available to contaminate the simulation. Using a real novice provides uncontaminated signal: their confused expressions, pauses, and questions map the exact gaps your mental model of them does not contain. This is deliberate error-seeking rather than comfort-seeking.
How to do it
- Identify someone outside your field who represents your target audience.
- Deliver your explanation with the same framing you plan to use for the real audience.
- Do not intervene when they look confused — note the moment and let them tell you where it broke.
- Revise exactly where the novice lost you, not where you felt least confident.
Evidence
User-testing and iterative design research consistently show that expert designers and writers systematically underestimate how confusing their output is until real novices interact with it. The principle is well established in cognitive engineering and UX. Hinds (1999) measured this "curse of expertise" directly — experts under-predicted how long novices would take, and debiasing prompts only partly corrected it — which is why substituting a real novice for an imagined one supplies signal the expert cannot generate alone (Nickerson, 1999). (clinical)
Most evidence comes from design and software usability rather than pure teaching contexts; the principle transfers, but effect sizes in educational settings are less directly studied.
Sources
- Hinds, P. J. (1999). The curse of expertise: The effects of expertise and debiasing methods on prediction of novice performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5(2), 205–221.
- Nickerson, R. S. (1999). How we know—and sometimes misjudge—what others know: Imputing one’s own knowledge to others. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 737–759.
Common mistake
Testing your explanation on a colleague who already knows the topic — they will simulate confusion but cannot actually produce it, so you learn nothing about real gaps.
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More practices for The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach
- Take the tap test before you present
Literally tap out a melody and notice how obvious it is to you — but invisible to listeners.
- Open with a concrete story, not with your framework
Lead with a specific, sensory narrative before introducing any abstraction.
- Run a jargon audit on every key explanation
Go word by word through your explanation and mark every term a newcomer would not know.
- Ask what the audience already knows before explaining
Probe prior knowledge explicitly rather than assuming it.
- Build a bridging analogy from what they know to what they don’t
Map the new concept onto a structure the audience already understands.
- Work backwards from what the learner needs to do
Start with the decision or action the learner must take, then trace back only to the knowledge that serves it.
- Deliberately slow down at conceptual transitions
Pause, name the transition, and check understanding before moving to the next idea.
Related concepts
- Concrete Examples: How to Make Abstract Ideas Stick
The cognitive mechanism behind examples and how to deploy them without fooling yourself
- The Feynman Technique, Step by Step
Explain it simply, find the gaps, and close them
- Make It Stick: The Science of Learning
Retrieval, spacing, interleaving, and elaboration — the evidence-backed core
- Deliberate Practice, Not Just Practice
Focused, feedback-driven practice at the edge of your ability