Only Familiar Information is a "Curse": Children's Ability to Predict What Their Peers Know.

The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the answers to factual questions and estimated how many peers would know the answers. When children learned familiar answers, they showed a curse of knowledge in their peer estimates. But, when children learned unfamiliar answers to the same questions, they did not show a curse of knowledge. These data shed light on the mechanisms underlying perspective taking, supporting a fluency misattribution account of the curse of knowledge.