Expertise in Decision Making

People face many consequential judgments and decisions for which they feel they lack the requisite knowledge. How should I invest my retirement savings? Why is my car making that noise? Will it rain during the family reunion on Saturday? Why does my daughter have a fever? For many such cases, people turn to someone else – an expert whom they trust to reach a better answer than they can reach themselves. But to what degree is trust warranted? This chapter reviews the literatures on expertise and on decision making to consider the nature and development of decision making expertise, including its strengths and weaknesses. Research on judgment and decision making (JDM) often portrays a pessimistic view of decision making ability: decisions are the product of cognitive shortcuts that can produce systematic and consequential errors (Kahneman, 2003). In turn, this pessimistic view has occasionally provoked a more optimistic rebuttal – ordinary cognition is well adapted to process limited information quickly and accurately (Gigerenzer, 2007). A similar debate has emerged in the literature on expert decision making (Kahneman & Klein, 2009). Researchers who have grounded their perspectives in JDM research have taken a more skeptical view of expert judgment (Camerer & Johnson, 1991; Tetlock, 2005). Other perspectives, such as the naturalistic decision making (NDM) approach of Gary Klein and his colleagues (Klein, 1998), have offered a positive account of the abilities of experts. Despite the apparent differences, a clear consensus has emerged since the 1990s (Hogarth, 2001; Kahneman & Klein, 2009; Shanteau, 1992) – the key issue is not whether expertise in decision making exists but that it emerges only under specifiable conditions. The main goal of this chapter is to provide a framework for identifying when expertise in decision making can emerge. Such an understanding is practically useful for seeking expertise in others or for striving to build it in oneself. 24

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