Analyzing the expert judge: A descriptive study of a stockbroker's decision process.

This study illustrates an analysis-of-variance technique for describ ing the use of information by persons making complex judgments. Ss were two stockbrokers who rated the growth potential of stocks on the basis of 11 factors taken from Standard S Poor reports. The technique proved capable of providing aprecise quantitative description of configural and nonconfigural information utilization. Each broker exhibited a substantial amount of configural processing. The technique appears to have promise for providing expercs with insight into their own processes and for teaching and evaluating "student" judges. ANALYZING THE EXPERT JUDGE: A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY OF A STOCKBROKER'S DECISION PROCESSES1 Paul Slovic Oregon Research Institute, Eugene The task of the expert judge, be he military officer, detective, businessman, physician, clinical psychologist, financial analyst, etc., requires him to combine items of information from a number of different sources into a decision or judgment. The key to the expert's success resides in his ability to interpret and integrate information appro priately. This means he must weight items of information differentially, according to their relevance, and must be able to qualify his inter pretations of a given fact when other considerations make such qualification necessary. There is no need to dwell upon the tremendous importance of being able to understand and describe how the expert uses information. However, such understanding does not come easily. All too often expert judgment is regarded as a mysterious, intuitive phenomenon— incapable of being described precisely. For example, Lusted (1960) relates a story about a radiologist famed for his diagnostic ability. Once, when he was questioned as to why he thought a particular shadow on an X-ray was a metastatic lesion, the physician replied, "Because it looks like it!" At the other extreme, we're all familiar with the expert who instructs others in the art of emulating his judgments by