The Projective Way of Knowing: A Useful Heuristic That Sometimes Misleads

Abstract

For many purposes, people need a reasonably good idea of what other people know. This article presents an argument and considers evidence that people use their own knowledge as a basis for developing models of what specific other people know in particular, that they tend to assume that other people know what they know. This is a generally useful heuristic, but the assumption is often made uncritically, with the consequence that people end up assuming that others have knowledge that they do not have.