Authors Chip and Dan Heath wrote an article for Harvard Business review called the curse of knowledge based on an experiment conducted at Stanford University in the year 1990. Elizabeth Newton, a psychology student conducted this very interesting experiment for her PHD dissertation. She called it the “Tappers & Listeners” experiment. She invited some of her friends and peers in college to be a part of the experiment. Each student was to play one of the two roles. ‘A Tapper’ or ‘A Listener’. The Tappers were given a list of twenty- five popular melodies such as “Happy Birth Day to you” and “Jingle Bells”’.

All they had to do was to tap out the melody on a table using their fingers. And guess what the listener had to do?

Well simple- They had to guess the song. And as you might have guessed by now, this was not as easy task at all. One of the 120 times a melody was tapped, the listener could guess it correctly only thrice. A success rate of 2.5% but the interesting part of the story is: Before the tappers even began, Elizabeth asked them to predict the probability of the listeners being able to guess the song correctly. And what do you think the tappers predicted? A 50% chance that they would be able to get the listeners to guess the melody correctly. Although their idea was that they would be able to get the listeners to guess the melody correctly one out of two times.  The reality was that listeners could only guess the melody once in forty attempts. Well, here’s what happening.The tappers know the melody well. Its clearly playing in his head. Therefore when his fingers are tapping the melody, they are in perfect sync with what’s playing in his head. And he is just not able to figure out why the listener cannot guess such a simple melody! And what about the listener? Well, he/she has no idea what’s happening. Because the melody is not playing in their head. Try as hard as they may they just cannot make any sense out of tapping. Have you ever told yours spouse, your child, your colleague or your subordinate at work to do something, with complete clarity in your head in what you wanted then to do? I am sure you have. And did you final out later, that they did put all their effort but did something not exactly what you were looking for and this caused so much frustration to both the parties. When this happens the next time, understand clearly who is the problem?  

It is the Tapper- not the Listener. Because you as the Tapper have it clears in your head. And you assume that it will clear to your Listener, Your Spouse, your child, your colleague, your friend as well. But that not true at all. And remember, what’s obvious to you may not be obvious the person who is listening to you. When the Listener Says he /she cannot understand what you are saying.