Expert-Induced Blindness

Hey 👋

Hope your 2025 has started well—it’s so set to be an interesting year. Let’s kick things off with a fresh new series on expert thinking…

Big idea 🍉

Have you ever played the game where one person taps out a song, and the other tries to guess what it is?

If not, you should try it. It’s great for making friends at parties AND it’ll enable you to make sophisticated comments about the systematic errors in thinking that arise from having deep knowledge about a topic (which might lose you some of those friends).

Let me explain.

In 1990, a researcher analysed the ‘guess the tune I’m tapping’ game. Tappers predicted that listeners would guess the song correctly 50% of the time. But in reality, listeners only got it right 2.5% of the time.

This wild mismatch is an example of a cognitive bias called ‘Expert-Induced Blindness’ (aka ‘Curse of Knowledge’). Once we know something—like the melody of a song or how to solve an equation—it becomes incredibly difficult to imagine not knowing it... or more importantly: it becomes hard to imagine others not knowing it.

The larger the gap in knowledge between two people, the more this bias rears its head. Schools (with all our expert teachers and novice learners) are fertile ground for expert-induced blindness to take root. As teachers, we can find ourselves systematically overestimating what our students know, and as a result: not giving them enough thinking time; not being explicit enough in our explanations; not explaining the ‘why’ as much as we should, and so on.

In the next Snack, we’ll explore this bias further: how it works, and what we can do to mitigate it. But for now, just try to build your awareness of it. See if you can spot it in action (both in yourself and in others).

🎓 For more, check out this paper outlining expert-induced blindness in action.

Summary

• When we know a lot more than someone about something, it can be hard to empathise with their lack of knowledge.

• This ‘expert-induced blindness’ can lead us to systematically overestimate what our students know.

• Becoming aware of this cognitive bias is the first step in mitigating it.

Little updates 🥕

• Cracking new (free) e-book by some of the biggest brains in education → explains how knowledge-rich curricula can support deep student thinking.

• Paper on the effects of rewards → suggests that extrinsic rewards can initiate engagement and help build intrinsic motivation, but be harmful in the long-term if used excessively or too late in the process.

• Study exploring ‘warm-strict’ teaching → finds that combining deep care and high expectations helps to guide learning and build strong relationships.

• Pre-print comparing ability grouping vs mixed-ability → finds no clear differences in student outcomes (but primary teachers feel slightly more able to help struggling and high-achieving students with ability grouping).

Be more informed in 2025 → Learn about Snacks PRO