The more you know, the harder it is to change someone’s mind

Here’s the bad news: The deeper your understanding of an issue and the stronger your conviction about the solution, the worse you often become at persuasion. This isn’t a character flaw; it’s a law of neuroscience. Once you understand it, you’ll stop wondering why your brilliant ideas and proposals keep floundering in meeting rooms. It’s due to a cognitive trap that the fields of behavioral economics and neuroscience have spent decades documenting: the curse of knowledge. Once I explain how it works, you’ll start to recognize why it’s working against your persuasion.

In the early 1990s, Stanford graduate student Elizabeth Newton designed a simple experiment that revealed something profound about human cognition. She divided participants into two groups: “tappers” and “listeners.” Tappers were given a list of well-known songs like “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” — simple tunes everyone knows. They were asked to tap out a song’s rhythm on a table while a listener tried to identify it. Before they began, tappers were asked to predict how often listeners would correctly identify the song. The tappers predicted a 50% success rate — after all, these were famous songs, and the rhythms were distinctive. They felt confident they could tap them out clearly. The actual success rate? Out of 120 songs tapped, listeners correctly identified only 3 — a success rate of 2.5%.

This result shocked the tappers. The rhythm was clear and unmistakable to them as they tapped. How could the listeners not hear the song perfectly? What the tappers didn’t realize was that they had a fundamentally different experience from their listeners. When you tap out “Happy Birthday to You,” you hear the melody in your head. The song is complete and vivid in your mind. The listeners, however, hear something completely different: disconnected taps, with no underlying melody. They’re trying to identify a song from percussion alone, which is nearly impossible even for familiar tunes.

Here’s the frustrating part: The tapper cannot experience what the listener is experiencing in the moment. Once you hear the melody, you cannot tap the rhythm without that melody playing in your head, but the listener hears only the taps. In other words, your knowledge has fundamentally altered your perception of what you believe others are experiencing. This is the curse of knowledge. And it doesn’t just apply to tapping songs. It applies to your persuasion, especially when you are the well-informed expert in the room. As you are about to learn from three economists, experts are lousy at thinking like their audiences.

Why experts fail to persuade

Economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber published a paper that challenged beliefs about how informed people predict the judgment of less-informed people. Economic models assumed that experts could accurately anticipate how novices would think. The researchers discovered something very surprising, however: Experts were systematically biased predictors. Building on psychologist Baruch Fischhoff’s earlier work on hindsight bias — the tendency to believe, once you know an outcome, that you would have predicted it all along — they found that once someone acquired knowledge or expertise, they became anchored in that more-informed state of mind. When asked to predict what someone without that knowledge would think or do, experts could not mentally set aside what they knew. They were pulled inevitably toward their informed perspective rather than the other person’s.

This curse of knowledge functions like a cognitive undertow. It becomes extraordinarily difficult to escape back to the state of not knowing, even temporarily and even when it would serve you to do so — especially when it comes to persuasion.

Here’s how this curse blindsides you in persuasion. You’ve spent weeks developing a proposal to solve a complex problem. You’ve acquired deep knowledge about the problem as well as considered several solutions and their trade-offs. You’ve thought through objections and counterarguments. You’ve found evidence that makes one solution stand out above the others. You’re now completely convinced of the way forward. By the time you present your proposal to decision-makers, you’re already deep in the curse of knowledge. You cannot accurately imagine what your proposal sounds like to anyone who’s encountering it for the first time. You cannot appreciate their state of ignorance or alternate perspective because you’re anchored in your state of knowledge.

While you need to simplify, translate, and educate your decision-makers, you instead persuade from the perspective of complexity and conviction. The various cognitive traps associated with the curse of knowledge distance you from your stakeholders’ perspectives, pushing you away from genuine engagement and ultimately leading you to persuasive impotence.

Now you can start to understand the baffling experience all of us have had: presenting what feels like an obvious and clear case for an idea and watching it hit a brick wall. From our perspective, everything is clear, logical, and persuasive. From our stakeholders’ perspective, we’re tapping out a rhythm to a song they can’t hear. What is playing in our heads — all that analysis, all those supporting arguments and evidence — is inaudible to them.

To further complicate matters, we become invested in a solution — “our” solution. Pride of ownership deepens our commitment. When stakeholders start to raise challenging questions, we say to ourselves: They must not be listening carefully. They must be resistant to change or protective of the status quo. The possibility that we’ve failed to build a bridge from their knowledge to ours doesn’t even occur to us, because we cannot see the gap.

The antidote to the curse of knowledge

There is an antidote to overcoming these psychological traps, but it requires a dramatic reframing of your understanding of the act of persuasion. You must abandon your mental model of persuasion as first and foremost a solution-centric activity*. Yes, at some point, you will start championing a particular solution, but only after an intensive exploration into the problem as well as its impact on key stakeholders. The core lesson here is that masterful persuasion starts with problem definition — not solution definition.

It’s not an easy perspective to accept. After all, you want to solve a problem efficiently and quickly. And who can resist the ego rewards of “pride of ownership” and the public recognition of how clever you are? Instead, with problem-centric persuasion, you’ll experience a different kind of reward: meaningful collaborations with colleagues in solving truly thorny problems. But this approach requires far more from your curiosity and skills of engagement, and — at the start — far less from your expertise and skills of advocacy.

Not so surprisingly, one of the trademark traits of leaders who are masterful at persuasion is that they’re instinctually curious. Before they try to change your mind, they work to understand it.

Truly effective persuasion begins with curiosity, not certainty. It begins with questions, not answers. It begins with exploring problems, not advocating solutions. As noted, later in the process, you will make a pitch and advocate for a particular solution. But this will occur only after you’ve gathered intelligence and built a rich understanding of the problem through others. Then you absolutely need to advance a clear recommendation. But the sequence matters profoundly. Questions first, pitches second.

Not so surprisingly, one of the trademark traits of leaders who are masterful at persuasion is that they’re instinctually curious. Before they try to change your mind, they work to understand it. They ask about your concerns, your priorities, your constraints, your resources, your values. Foundational to their curiosity is their capacity to listen. One of the most skillful persuasive leaders I’ve ever known said to me: “When I am most effective at persuasion, I’m spending 90% of my time listening and 10% talking.”

After he made this bold assertion, I decided to watch him in action. This is what I observed. When he had an idea or initiative he wanted to champion, he’d start with one-on-one meetings with colleagues, asking them questions and listening carefully. Together they would deep-dive into the problem he wanted to tackle. A set of simple exploratory questions would always kick off the process: Do you see this as a problem? What’s behind it? Do you feel it’s a pressing problem, or is it something we can put off? Why haven’t we successfully addressed it to date? How would you approach solving it? Who needs to get behind any solution? Who’s likely to oppose it? Who would be implementing any solution? What are the resources that might be needed, and are they at hand?

This approach built around questioning and listening remains counterintuitive for most people. The pitch reflex is too deeply embedded. It takes a conscious effort to resist. Listen first, advocate second.

* Author’s Note: The one exception here would be clients who are explicitly seeking your expertise to solve a problem only you know how to solve.

This article is featured on Big Think.