Years ago, I had a boss who was not a great communicator. I distinctly remember one preparation session we had for a review committee meeting. It was a follow up meeting and I planned to present again most of the background and contextual information that I showed the first time around. I had a dim idea that repetition was an important part of communication, so reiterating the basics seemed like a good idea. However, my boss summarily ordered me to cut all the background information because, “We told them all that six months ago.” I went along with the edict since I was relatively young and inexperienced. When I actually gave the presentation, I spent nearly the whole time answering questions from the committee members about the very background and context information I was told to cut. It turns out that the committee barely remembered anything from six months ago. This was a powerful lesson that’s stuck with me over the years.
If you think the committee members were just shirking their duty or atypical in any way, then you’re as misguided as my old boss was. They were merely people exhibiting typical human nature. This story is just one small example of how our cognitive biases can get physicists into trouble when it comes to communicating our ideas and messages. Fortunately, I survived my misstep with that review committee with only superficial damage. The consequences of ineffective communication can be much worse for both individuals and entire fields. At the personal level, I have seen candidates make the mistake of providing far too little introduction and background material in their job talks more times than I can count, and it never bodes well for the rest of the interview. At a much larger scale, take the example of the Superconducting Super Collider project cancellation, which is a great case study in big science gone awry. People cite many causes for that project’s failure, but I have always seen it primarily as a multi-level breakdown in effective communication.
Let’s go back and see what went wrong in the review committee story. First, my boss exhibited a classic case of what’s called the curse of knowledge. This is the implicit tendency for people to assume that others have the background knowledge to understand things the way they do. Another way to look at this is that daily familiarly with particular material, say quantum mechanics, leads us to forget how hard it was to assimilate the information in the first place. The curse of knowledge is rife in physics, as anyone who has struggle through a course with an unrelatable and oracular professor can attest. Unfortunately, this bias is baked into our brains and is hard to overcome. So, the student who rails at his professor’s cryptic lectures all to often becomes the post-doc giving equally incomprehensible job talks. Second, there’s the egocentric bias. People are way more likely to remember information that is about them or concerns them directly. Members of a review committee are, by definition, there to evaluate someone else’s work. Serving on such committees may be an important professional duty, but there is no way that committee service gets more than a tiny faction of the mental energy the members devote to their own work. Hence the poor memories between committee sessions. Note how there is a sort of destructive interference between these two natural biases that works to open a communications gulf between a typical presenter and their audience.
This natural conspiracy of cognitive biases against effective communication is dangerous at any career stage but carries particular hazards in one’s early career. At that stage, the typical young scientist both holds exaggerated ideas about the breath of knowledge possessed by more senior scientists and feels a need to demonstrate their intelligence and mastery of a subject. So, they fill up a job talk or general seminar with difficult minutiae and lose the audience almost immediately. Most people listening to an interview talk won’t ask questions if you lose them. What’s worse is that by trying to make yourself look smart, you’ve made those who can’t follow your talk feel inferior at some level, which may very well get transformed into dislike of you in their subconscious. Then that feeling gets rationalized in one way or another and you don’t get a job offer. Again, this is simply part of human nature, not some moral failing.
What steps lead to more effective communication? First, always understand your audience. If you are interviewing for a post-doc in the group of one of your advisor’s close collaborators, then go ahead and skip most of the introduction and talk about the gritty detail you know they understand. However, you need to re-calibrate substantially for any other audience, e.g. a general group of physicists or the general public. Second, start from the point where you know you have common ground with your listeners. When I gave talks during the plasma wakefield accelerator phase of my career I would jump right into specifics at a small workshop for specialists only, start with the very basic problem of an electrostatic plasma oscillation in a general physics seminar, and remind the general public of the difference between atoms, nuclei, and electrons. Third, tell a story. Follow the thread of increasing specialization through your field from the starting point of common ground to your unique contribution or point. Then state your take away message as succinctly as possible using an audience-appropriate level of concepts and terminology. Again, it depends on who you are talking to, but you will probably spend two thirds or three quarters of your time telling the background story in an effective talk. That might seem like a lot, but it sets the audience up to understand and appreciate the point you make at the end. The audience feels smart when they come away feeling that they’ve understood what you had to say, which flips around the negative psychological dynamic described above and makes you much more likable. Successful communication and a glow of likability cannot guarantee you’ll get the job, but it will greatly improve your odds.