Adapted from The Persuasive Leader: Proven Strategies for Moving People and Ideas by Jay A. Conger. Published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.

Here’s the bad news: The deeper your understanding of an issue and the stronger your conviction about the solution, the worse you often become at persuasion. This isn’t a character flaw; it’s a law of neuroscience. Once you understand it, you’ll stop wondering why your brilliant ideas and proposals keep floundering in meeting rooms. It’s due to a cognitive trap that the fields of behavioral economics and neuroscience have spent decades documenting: the curse of knowledge . Once I explain how it works, you’ll start to recognize why it’s working against your persuasion.

In the early 1990s, Stanford graduate student Elizabeth Newton designed a simple experiment that revealed something profound about human cognition.…