To communicate effectively, people must have a reasonably accurate idea about what specific other people know. An obvious starting point for building a model of what another knows is what one oneself knows, or thinks one knows. This article reviews evidence that people impute their own knowledge to others and that, although this serves them well in general, they often do so uncritically, with the result of erroneously assuming that other people have the same knowledge. Overimputation of one's own knowledge can contribute to communication difficulties. Corrective approaches are considered. A conceptualization of where own-knowledge imputation fits in the process of developing models of other people's knowledge is proposed. To communicate effectively with other people, one must have a reasonably accurate idea of what they do and do not know that is pertinent to the communication. Treating people as though they have knowledge that they do not have can result in miscommunication and perhaps embarrassment. On the other hand, a fundamental rule of conversation, at least according to a Gricean view, is that one generally does not convey to others information that one can assume they already have (Grice, 1975) . A speaker who overestimates what his or her listeners know may talk over their heads; one who underestimates their knowledge may, in the interest of being clear, be perceived as talking down to them. Both types of misjudgment work against effective and efficient communication. The purpose of this article is to consider the general question of how people form models of what other people know and, in particular, the role that the imputation of one's own knowledge to others plays in that process. Knowledge in this context is given a sufficiently broad connotation to include beliefs, opinions, suppositions, attitudes, and related states of mind. Much work on social cognition has dealt with questions regarding how people come to know how others feel and how they will behave in specified situations; less attention has been given to the question of how people form models of what others know. That people form such models is taken as given; how they do so, and how effectively they do so, are questions of some theoretical and practical significance. How people develop a theory of mind has been the focus of a considerable amount of research, especially since Premack and Woodruff (1978) first used the term in an article that addressed the question of whether a chimpanzee has one. The question sparked a rash of studies aimed not only at attempting to answer it but at investigating how children acquire a theory of mind during the normal course of development. pointed out that a key assumption underlying much of this research is that an understanding of mind is a universal quest. Major theoretical treatments of the subject have been reviewed by Astington (1993) , Astington and Gopnick (1991), and Lillard (1998) The view presented here is not in conflict with any of the Lillard-reviewed accounts of how a theory of mind develops, but it has much in common with what she referred to as the simulation view, according to which, in order to understand what people are thinking or feeling in a particular situation, one imagines oneself in that situation and discovers what one would think or how one would feel (Gordon, 1995a (Gordon, , 1995b . I assume that the basic way of attempting to understand what another knows, or how another feels in a particular situation, is by considering what one oneself knows or would feel in that situation. The points that I argue are that one uses one's own knowledge as the primary basis for developing a model of what specific others know and that this works quite well for many purposes but that it often results in imputing to others knowledge that they do not have.
Some researchers theorize that interlocutors develop a mental model of what they assume others know and expect, and use this model when tailoring their utterances to their audience REF .
How we know-and sometimes misjudge-what others know : Imputing one's own knowledge to others
Psychological Bulletin
Psychology