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The Reason Smart People Write Content Nobody Understands
A 1990 experiment with tapped-out songs explains why your expertise might be the thing killing your content.
In 1990, a Stanford graduate student named Elizabeth Newton ran one of my favorite experiments of all time. It’s so simple you could try it at dinner tonight.
She split people into two groups: tappers and listeners. Each tapper picked a well-known song, things like “Happy Birthday,” and tapped out its rhythm on a table with their knuckles. The listener’s job was to guess the song.
Before they started, the tappers were asked to predict how often listeners would get it right. They guessed about half the time.
The actual result? Out of 120 songs tapped, listeners guessed correctly just three times. That’s 2.5%.
Why were the tappers so wildly wrong? Because while they were tapping, they could hear the song in their heads. The melody, the lyrics, all of it. To them, the taps were obviously “Happy Birthday.” To the listener, it was just a strange, irregular knocking. The tappers literally could not imagine what it was like to hear the taps without the music.
Chip and Dan Heath, who made this study famous in their book Made to Stick, popularized an…
