Moving Forward

The 2024 Election and the Curse of the Curse of Knowledge

We were going to release a different piece today, but we instead wanted to address the election that’s on everyone’s mind. Whether you’re energized by the results or just trying to process what they mean, moral understanding remains more important than ever. We hope these insights from psychology can offer something valuable as we move forward.

Emotions are running high across the political spectrum. Many feel frustrated, worried or fearful—and understandably so. Others feel victorious and validated, which naturally brings a sense of accomplishment. No matter where you stand, it’s normal to feel that your views are overshadowed by the cries of anger or celebration from the other side.

In moments like this, moral understanding can take many different forms. Sometimes, it means sitting down with a close friend and being open to considering the world from their perspective. Other times, it’s a reminder that, despite how easy it is to assume the worst in others, most people still want the best for their families and our country. 

Working with each other feels especially difficult now because the right direction for our country seems so obvious to each of us. Psychology teaches us that one of the key challenges to understanding is stepping into someone else’s shoes and imagining how they might see things differently—a problem sometimes called “the curse of knowledge.” 

The Curse of the Curse of Knowledge

Knowledge is power, but it can also be a curse. The curse of knowledge means that once we know something, it becomes difficult to imagine what it was like to not know that thing. The curse of knowledge is why doctors use medical jargon that leaves patients confused and worried—they forget what it was like to not know the meaning of words like benign and metastasize.

The curse of knowledge is also why we give strangers confusing driving directions, naively leaving out key turns and landmarks that we assume they must know about (See Figure 1). This is really a failure of what psychologists call “theory of mind”—our ability to imagine the perspective of another and appreciate how they could truly see things differently.

The curse of knowledge is one reason we assume that everyone else shares our set of facts and information. It’s related to the concept of “naive realism,” our tendency to assume that our perception of the world is objective, and therefore shared by everyone. 

These concepts are all closely linked, but the term “curse of knowledge” is especially useful for understanding political divides, because we assume that our political opponents know everything that we know, yet still vote against the rational choice. 

Figure 1. The Curse of Knowledge: We (incorrectly) assume that others know what we know.

In a 2023 paper, researchers conducted five studies showing that people fall victim to the curse of knowledge when judging their political opponents. In a first study, Democrats and Republicans read political news stories from both left-leaning (Rachel Maddow) and right-leaning (Tucker Carlson) sources. For example, one left-leaning story read “Interviews with former Trump administration staffers and associates revealed that the former president often violated the Presidential Records Act by destroying government documents.” Participants then indicated whether they had heard this story, and then estimated the portion of their political opponents that had also heard this story. 

The researchers found that participants incorrectly assumed that the news stories were common knowledge to their political opponents. Democrats rated 71% of the left-leaning stories as common knowledge on both sides, but Republicans had only heard of 49% of these stories. Similarly, Republicans assumed that 68% of the right-leaning stories were common knowledge, but Democrats were only familiar with 38% of them. Both sides assumed that the terrible and damning things they had heard about the other party were common knowledge to those people, when the reality was that they were largely unaware. Importantly, the more people fell victim to the curse of knowledge in these studies, the more animosity they felt towards their political opponents.

We can see this political curse of knowledge playing out today. If you’re a Democrat, it’s easy to believe that people who voted for Trump see him as a bigoted authoritarian and yet endorse him all the same—and perhaps even because of these flaws. If you’re a Republican, it’s easy to assume that Democrats know that Harris is a communist who wants to destroy personal freedoms—and yet they voted for her. If this is what you believe, then it’s no wonder that the other side seems so fundamentally immoral. But in reality, people have completely different views of the two candidates, seeing them as righteous defenders of democracy.

As the authors of the political curse of knowledge paper explain, when our political opponents disagree with us, we tend to gravitate towards any of three possible explanations: 1) they are biased, 2) they are irrational, or 3) they just don’t have the same information as you. The curse of knowledge pulls us to assume the worst in our opponents, thinking of them as 1) biased and 2) irrational, when the more accurate explanation of why we come to hold different opinions (according to these authors) is that we share different information environments.

If this is true, then it’s more important than ever to approach conversations across the aisle with humility and a shared goal of learning. We don’t expect that these conversations will be easy, or that you’ll always walk away agreeing with the perspective of your opponents. Instead, now is the time to allow ourselves to sit with our beliefs, take stock of what we know, and remember that regardless of how we feel, we will continue to move forward. It’s likely that animosity and frustration will rise from both sides over the coming weeks. It’s also more than likely that the sun will continue to rise, we will yet again surprise ourselves with how much more we have to learn, and we will be reminded that at our core, most people are good. We may be cursed with knowledge, but we are not cursed to hate one another. And over the next four years, that will make all the difference.