We examined the universality of the curse of knowledge (i.e., the tendency to be biased by one’s knowledge when inferring other perspectives) by investigating it in a unique cross-cultural sample; a nomadic Nilo-Saharan pastoralist society in East Africa, the Turkana. Forty Turkana children were asked eight factual questions and asked to predict how widely-known those facts were among their peers. To test the effect of their knowledge, we taught children the answers to half of the questions, while the other half were unknown. Based on findings suggesting the bias’s universality, we predicted that children would estimate that more of their peers would know the answers to the questions that were taught versus the unknown questions. We also predicted that with age children would become less biased by their knowledge. In contrast, we found that only Turkana males were biased by their knowledge when inferring their peers’ perspectives, and the bias did not change with age. We discuss the implications of these findings.

我们通过在独特的跨文化样本中进行调查，研究了知识诅咒的普遍性（即，在推论其他观点时知识被偏见的趋势）；东非的图尔卡纳（Turkana）游牧尼罗撒哈拉沙漠游牧社会。向40名图尔卡纳儿童提出了8个事实问题，并被要求预测这些事实在同龄人中的知名度。为了测试他们的知识效果，我们教了孩子一半问题的答案，而另一半则是未知的。根据表明偏见普遍性的发现，我们预测孩子会估计，与未知问题相比，更多的同龄人会知道所教问题的答案。我们还预测，随着年龄的增长，孩子们将不会因其知识而产生偏见。相比之下，我们发现，只有图尔卡纳（Turkana）男性在推断同龄人的观点时会因自己的知识而有偏见，而且这种偏见并不会随着年龄的增长而改变。我们讨论了这些发现的含义。