There are two groups of people in the world.
"Fuel Guage" by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0
People who know what the arrow inside the red circle tells them about a car, and people who don't.
If you’re in the first group, you can't imagine NOT knowing this piece of information. You may remember when or how you learned it, but ever since, you think it's so obvious, everyone should know it.
If you're in the second group, congratulations, you’re about to join the first group. You’ll remember this as the day you learned what it means.
Meet Jim Moylan
In 1986, Jim Moylan was driving a company car back to work. It was raining as he pulled up to a gas station to fill the tank, and, because he wasn't familiar with the car, he pulled up to the station with the fuel door on the wrong side. He got out, got wet, and got irritated because he would now have to get back in the car and pull it back around so that the fuel door was on the side facing the pump.
When Moylan got back to work, he wrote a memo to his boss proposing an arrow be added to the fuel gauge to point to the side of the car the fuel door was on.
I forgot to mention Jim Moylan was a designer at Ford Motor Company and by 1989, Ford was adding "Moylan's arrow" to the fuel gauges of all new cars. Shortly after, other car manufacturers added the arrow to their cars.
When you get a new car, or rent a car, or borrow your friend's car, you will never have to guess on which side of the car the fuel door is located thanks to Jim Moylan.
You’ve Been Cursed
If this is your first time hearing about Moylan's arrow, you have just been afflicted with the Curse of Knowledge.
The Curse of Knowledge was illustrated in 1990, by a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton. Her experiment used "a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener.” Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess the song." Newton found the listeners were able to identify the songs less frequently than the tappers predicted. The study and the Curse of Knowledge are summarized in a 2006 Harvard Business Review article by Chip and Dan Heath.
Simply put, once you learn something you can never remember what it was like to not know it. The Curse of Knowledge leads the "knowers" to assume everyone has the same knowledge and to make errors in judgment and communication based on this curse.
Those of you who already knew about Moylan's arrow can't believe there are people who just learned about it minutes ago. Those of you who just learned about it, will soon forget the feelings you have now about your newly learned knowledge and forget what it was like to NOT know this information.
Beyond arrows on fuel gauges, the world is full of information. There is no way we can know it all, nor do we need to. We can access the collective knowledge of the known universe from a single web page.
As experts in our fields or just regular human beings, we take for granted the fact there are things we know that others don't. We can't remember what it was like to not know what we know and when we come across someone who doesn't know what we know, we think less of them. We think there is something wrong with them.
If you were in the first group of people, did you think it would be ridiculous someone didn't know about the arrow on the gas gauge?
Knowledge is meant to be given to others
I talked about this in Chapter 5 of my book The Fast and Easy Guide to Networking for Introverts. When you’re networking with someone, you need to give them something. This can be advice or recommendations or ideas which all fall under the category of knowledge.
The Curse of Knowledge prevents us from sharing our knowledge.
It keeps us from giving our knowledge to other people.
What is it that you know that you believe everyone already knows?
Share it with your friends or your professional connections.
That's what I intend to do everyday with my words.
That's where I am focusing my writing for now.
That's what you will see from me.
If you learn something new from my writing, mission accomplished. Share it with someone else who might not know about it.
If you read what I write and say, "I already knew that," be sure to share it with someone else who might not have known it.
What is it you know that you think everyone already knows?
Share with me, help me learn, and share it with others.
The Rabbit Hole
My goal is to make even the most ridiculous shit seem interesting. I love the stories about the people behind the weird facts.
The Rabbit Hole is the extra stuff. The footnotes. The trail of bread crumbs I followed as I wrote this article. You can follow them down the Rabbit Hole if you want to learn more.
This is the opposite of TL;DR.
You may find yourself wasting a lot of time here.
You've been warned!
Learn more about The Curse of Knowledge on Effectiviology
Before I wrote this, I didn't know the arrow was called Moylan’s Arrow, and I didn't know where the arrow came from, but through the wonders of the internet, I learned something new.
To read more about Jim Moylan, see the links below.
https://jalopnik.com/the-inventor-of-the-little-arrow-that-tells-you-what-si-1829601068
Hear the story of the Moylan Arrow from Jim Moylan himself on the Every Little Thing podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/do-you-need-to-warm-up-your-car-plus-a-teeny-glorious-car-hack/id1225760210?i=1000421341457