Explaining Complex Information: The Curse of Knowledge

A friend was showing me an AI tool he'd built to analyze how companies operate. It generated detailed reports full of technical findings, frameworks, and recommendations. There was clearly a lot of work behind the analysis, but as I read one, I kept wondering: Okay, but what's the actual takeaway here?

We ended up talking about how you can know a subject inside out and still struggle to explain it to someone else. The report didn't necessarily need less information. I just needed help understanding which findings mattered, why they mattered, and what someone could do with them. It made me curious about something I'd noticed before: why does knowing more about a subject sometimes makes it harder to explain?

Experts Can Forget What It's Like Not to Know Something

Think about something you've been doing for years. Maybe it's a software program you use every day, a skill you've practiced for a long time, or a subject you know particularly well. Things that once required a lot of concentration now feel obvious. You recognize patterns, make connections, and move through tasks without having to think about every step. That's one of the benefits of expertise, but it also means you might have forgotten just how much you had to learn to get there.

Imagine showing a new colleague how to use a software system you've worked with for years. You know the interface, the shortcuts, and how everything connects, so you naturally move through it quite quickly. Meanwhile, your colleague is still trying to understand what the different features do and how everything fits together. The steps you skip because they seem obvious might be exactly the ones they need you to explain.

Psychologists have a name for this: the curse of knowledge. Once we know something, it becomes difficult to imagine what it's like not to know it. A related concept, the expert blind spot, describes how expertise can make us less aware of the difficulties beginners experience.

In a 1999 study, psychologist Pamela Hinds found that people with greater expertise were worse at estimating how long beginners would need to complete a task. They tended to underestimate the time required, and trying to correct their estimates didn't help much.

It shows how our own experience can become a pretty unreliable guide to someone else's. Once you've learned something, you can't easily put yourself back in the position of someone encountering it for the first time. And this doesn't just happen between experts and complete beginners. We can easily assume that someone who's intelligent, experienced, or works in the same industry will understand what we're explaining. But an excellent finance director might know very little about a particular technical framework, just as an experienced engineer might be unfamiliar with the business decisions a report is supposed to support.

The lesson isn't that experts are bad at explaining things. It's that knowing a subject well doesn't mean we know what someone else already understands. So before explaining something complicated, find out where the other person is starting from. What do they already know? Which concepts are familiar? And which parts might need more explanation than we think?

Of course, understanding the terminology is only half the problem. Someone can follow every word you're saying and still have no idea why any of it matters.

Good Explanations Tell Readers What Matters, Not Just What You Know

I think this is one of the most common problems with complicated reports and presentations. The information might be accurate, the analysis might be excellent, and the reader might understand all the terminology. But they're still left to work out what the important findings are, and why they should care.

Imagine receiving a report about supplier performance at a manufacturing company. It includes delivery times, operational risks, performance scores, and detailed explanations of how the analysis was conducted. Useful information, potentially. But what if the most important finding is that nearly all the delivery delays are coming from one supplier rather than the warehouse? Wouldn't you want to know that before reading through all the supporting data?

Put the Main Finding Before the Supporting Details

Compare these two headings for the same fictional report.

Version 1: Supplier Performance Analysis

The report presents delivery metrics, operational assessments, risk classifications, and supplier performance comparisons.

Version 2: Most Delivery Delays Come From One Supplier, Not the Warehouse

The analysis identifies where delays are concentrated, what may be causing them, and which operational changes deserve further investigation.

The second version doesn't make the analysis any less detailed or accurate. It simply tells you what to pay attention to. If you need a quick overview, you can immediately understand the main finding. If you're responsible for evaluating the recommendation, you can still examine the methodology, data, and supporting evidence.

The difficulty is that when you know a subject really well, everything can feel important. You understand how all the pieces connect, so you're tempted to explain them all. But your audience doesn't necessarily need to understand every part of your thinking to understand your conclusion.

They might also be looking at the information for a completely different reason.

A technical specialist might want to know whether the analysis is reliable. A CEO might be more interested in which operational risks need attention. Someone responsible for implementing the recommendations will probably need to understand the dependencies and next steps.

Same information, different questions.

That's why deciding what matters to your audience is just as important as knowing what you're talking about.

Before preparing a report or presentation, ask yourself what the person reading it actually needs. What are they trying to understand or decide? What would change how they see the situation? Which details are essential, and which ones can come later?

Not every explanation needs to lead to an action. Sometimes the goal is simply to help someone understand an idea. But even then, we should be able to explain what we want the reader to take away from it.

Poorly Organized Information Makes Understanding Harder Than It Needs to Be

There's something else happening when you read a complicated report and struggle to find the point. You're not just processing the information itself. You're also spending energy figuring out

how it's organized, which parts matter, and how everything connects. And that effort adds up.

Our working memory can only handle a limited amount of new information at once. Some subjects are genuinely difficult because there are lots of ideas and relationships to understand. But we can make them even harder by presenting that information in a confusing way. This is one of the ideas behind cognitive load theory, developed through the work of psychologist John Sweller and other researchers. The theory distinguishes between the effort required to understand something complex and the unnecessary effort created by how information is presented.

That second type is called extraneous cognitive load. As explained in a 2010 research review, reducing unnecessary mental effort can help people focus more of their attention on learning the material.

Think about the last time you had to read a dense document. You might have understood the individual sentences perfectly well but still found yourself rereading sections, trying to remember what was important, or scrolling back to figure out how two ideas were related.

The problem wasn't necessarily that the subject was too complicated. Part of the difficulty came from the work you had to do just to make sense of how it was presented.

Clear Headings Help Readers See What Matters

Imagine you're looking at a presentation slide titled "Customer Support Performance." You know the topic, but you don't know what the data is supposed to tell you. Now imagine the heading says "Support Requests Increased, but Resolution Times Stayed Stable." You immediately know what to look for in the chart. The data can then show you how much requests increased, how resolution times changed, and whether there are any important exceptions. The information hasn't changed. You're just getting a little help interpreting it.

There's research supporting this approach. A 2018 meta-analysis examined 103 studies on signaling, which involves using cues to highlight important information and show how learning materials are organized. The researchers found that these cues helped people remember information, apply what they'd learned, and reduce unnecessary mental effort.

Most of the studies focused on educational materials, so we shouldn't assume the results apply in exactly the same way to every report or presentation. Still, I think there's a useful principle here.

Making important information easier to find means people can spend less effort looking for the point and more effort understanding it.

I like the idea of presenting complicated information in layers. Start with the main finding, explain what it means, and then provide the evidence and technical details that support it.

That way, someone who needs an overview can understand the essentials, while someone who needs to examine the analysis can go deeper.

And this doesn't mean hiding complexity. It means organizing it so people can approach it without having to figure everything out at once.

Beginners and Experts Don't Need the Same Type of Explanation

There's an important catch to all this advice about making things easier to understand: an explanation that works brilliantly for one person might not be particularly useful for someone else.

Sometimes people need clear, practical instructions. Other times, they need to understand the reasoning behind those instructions so they can apply what they've learned somewhere else.

Concrete Instructions Help People Learn Something New

Imagine you're teaching a new colleague how to write a weekly project update. Instead of explaining the theory behind effective business communication, you show them an example and walk them through the structure: what changed this week, what's blocking progress, and what needs to happen next. They can follow that format and produce a useful update straight away.

This is where concrete examples and step-by-step instructions are helpful. When you're doing something unfamiliar, you don't necessarily need to understand every principle behind it. Sometimes you just need enough guidance to get started and complete the task.

Someone who has only recently learned the same skill might even be particularly good at explaining it, because they still remember which steps were confusing and what helped them figure things out.

Understanding the Bigger Picture Helps Us Use What We've Learned

But what happens when that same colleague needs to prepare a client presentation or a project handover instead? The weekly update template probably won't be enough. What could help is understanding why the structure works: good updates make it easy for readers to see what's changed, why it matters, and what needs their attention. Once your colleague understands that principle, they can use it in other types of communication, even when the format changes.

This difference showed up in an interesting 2001 experiment by Pamela Hinds and her colleagues. They asked experts and beginners to teach people how to wire an electronic circuit. Those taught by beginners performed better on the task they'd practiced, but those taught by experts did better when they had to apply what they'd learned to a different task.

The researchers found that beginners tended to give more concrete instructions, while experts focused more on abstract concepts. The concrete explanations helped people complete the immediate task, but the abstract explanations helped them use their knowledge in a new situation.

I love this finding because it challenges the idea that the easiest explanation is always the best one. It really depends on what you want someone to learn.

There's also a related finding called the expertise reversal effect. A 2003 review found that teaching methods that help beginners can become less useful as people gain experience. Someone who's new to a subject might need detailed examples and instructions, while someone who already understands the basics may benefit more from exploring the bigger picture.

So I wouldn't assume that making something understandable always means removing technical terminology or explaining everything at a beginner's level. Sometimes people need practical instructions, sometimes they need a deeper explanation, and often they benefit from both.

Match the explanation to what someone already knows and what they need to do with that knowledge.

Complicated Language Can Make a Weak Explanation Sound Convincing

Have you ever read something full of technical terms and impressive-sounding language, only to finish it without really understanding what it was saying? Sometimes we assume that if something sounds complicated, there must be a lot of knowledge behind it. And in some cases, that's true. Specialized language can be useful because it allows people who understand a subject to communicate very precise ideas.

But complicated language can also make an explanation seem better than it actually is. Research has found two different effects here.

In a 2006 paper, psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer found that using unnecessarily complicated words could actually make writers appear less intelligent. When something is harder to read than it needs to be, that difficulty can influence how we judge the person who wrote it. But a 2025 study by Francisco Cruz and Tania Lombrozo found something almost opposite. Across nine experiments involving 6,698 participants, they found that scientific jargon could sometimes make explanations feel more satisfying, even when it made them harder to understand.

One of the most interesting findings was that people sometimes assumed the technical terms contained information that was missing from an otherwise incomplete explanation.

In other words, jargon could make a weak explanation feel more complete than it really was.

These studies were looking at different things. One examined how complicated vocabulary affected perceptions of intelligence, while the other looked at how scientific jargon influenced people's judgments of explanations. But together, they raise an interesting question: how often do we confuse sounding knowledgeable with actually being helpful?

Think about reports that introduce a new framework, give it a complicated name, and explain all its components, but never quite tell you what the framework reveals or why you should care.

The terminology might be perfectly accurate. The framework might even be useful. But if the reader doesn't understand what it means or how to use it, the explanation hasn't done much for them.

I don't think the answer is to avoid jargon altogether. If you're communicating with people who understand the terminology, technical language can be the clearest and most accurate option.

The question is whether those terms are helping your audience understand something or simply making the explanation sound more sophisticated.

You can explain advanced concepts using straightforward language without making them any less sophisticated. Often, that takes a pretty good understanding of the subject in the first place.

Feeling Like You Understand Something Doesn't Mean You Actually Do

There's another problem with explanations that sound convincing. Sometimes we think we've understood something until we try to explain it ourselves. You might follow along perfectly well while someone describes how a system works, but when you have to explain it to another person, you suddenly realize there are parts you don't really understand.

Psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil explored a related effect in a 2002 study. They found that people often believed they understood everyday objects and mechanisms much better than they actually did. When asked to explain how those things worked in detail, they became more aware of the gaps in their knowledge. They called this the illusion of explanatory depth.

The study wasn't about workplace presentations or technical reports, but I think the finding raises an interesting question about communication. How do we know whether someone has genuinely understood our explanation, rather than simply feeling that it makes sense?

The 2025 research on scientific jargon offers another clue. When participants tried to come up with their own explanations, they became better at recognizing gaps in explanations that had initially seemed satisfying. So perhaps asking someone "Does that make sense?" isn't always the most useful way to find out whether your explanation worked.

If you're teaching someone a new skill, you could see whether they can apply it in a different situation. If you're presenting a recommendation, you might ask what implications they see for their own work or which questions they'd want answered before making a decision.

You don't need to turn every conversation into a test. But it's worth remembering that someone finding your explanation convincing isn't the same as them understanding it.

Explaining Something Well Means Doing More of the Thinking for Your Audience

I started looking into this because I was curious about why someone could produce such detailed, technically impressive work and still struggle to communicate what mattered. My main takeaway is that good explanations require a different kind of effort from simply knowing a lot about a subject. You need to recognize what someone else might not know, decide which information is relevant to them, find a useful way to organize it, and choose how much detail they need.

And sometimes your expertise can actually make those decisions harder, because the connections that seem obvious to you aren't necessarily obvious to anyone else.

I think this matters even more now that AI can produce detailed reports, analyses, and explanations so quickly. We can generate an enormous amount of information, but that doesn't mean we're automatically helping people understand more. Someone still needs to question the findings, decide what deserves attention, and explain what it all means.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that clear communication isn't necessarily about making complicated things simpler. It's about deciding which parts of the complexity your audience needs to understand and helping them get there.

Making complex information understandable means doing more thinking yourself so the reader doesn't have to.

Frequently asked questions

What is the curse of knowledge in psychology?

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult to imagine what someone else knows once we've learned something ourselves. It can lead us to assume that information is more obvious or easier to understand than it actually is.

What is an example of the curse of knowledge?

Imagine an experienced employee training someone on a software system. They skip steps because those steps feel obvious, but the new employee doesn't yet understand how everything works. The expert's familiarity makes it harder to recognize what needs explaining.

What is the difference between the curse of knowledge and the expert blind spot?

The curse of knowledge is a broader bias that affects how we judge what other people know. The expert blind spot is a related problem where experts struggle to recognize the difficulties beginners face, particularly when learning or completing unfamiliar tasks.

What is cognitive load theory?

Cognitive load theory explains how the limits of our working memory affect learning. When information is complicated or poorly organized, we have to spend more mental effort processing it. Clear explanations can reduce unnecessary effort and make it easier to focus on understanding the subject.

What is the signaling effect in learning?

The signaling effect describes how cues such as clear headings, highlighted information, and visual markers can help people identify what's important. Research suggests these cues can reduce cognitive load and improve learning, particularly in educational materials.

Why do beginners and experts need different explanations?

Beginners often benefit from concrete examples and step-by-step instructions because they're still learning the basics. More experienced people may benefit from explanations that focus on underlying principles and connections between ideas. The best approach depends on what someone already knows and what they need to learn.

What is the expertise reversal effect?

The expertise reversal effect happens when teaching methods that help beginners become less useful, or even counterproductive, for more experienced learners. For example, detailed instructions might help someone learning a new skill but feel unnecessary to someone who already understands it.

What is processing fluency in psychology?

Processing fluency refers to how easily we can understand or mentally process information. It can influence how we judge what we're reading or hearing. For example, unnecessarily complicated language may make a writer seem less intelligent because the information feels harder to process.

What is the illusion of explanatory depth?

The illusion of explanatory depth is our tendency to believe we understand something better than we actually do. We might feel confident about how something works until we're asked to explain it in detail and realize there are gaps in our knowledge.

How can you overcome the curse of knowledge when explaining something?

Start by finding out what your audience already knows. Explain the main point before introducing supporting details, use examples that make unfamiliar ideas easier to understand, and check whether people can apply what they've learned. The goal isn't to remove complexity, but to help people make sense of it.