James SHANTEAU

Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA

Previous studies of expert decision makers have concluded that experts, because of cognitive limitations, are generally inaccurate, unreliable, biased, lack self-insight, and gain little with experience. Overall, previous psychological studies have painted a rather bleak picture of the decision-making abilities of experts. The research reviewed here provides a different view of experts in two respects. First, expert decision makers have been found to use strategies, such as reliance on group feedback, willingness to make adjustments, and a divide-and-conquer approach, which help them overcome the effects of cognitive limitations. Second, top decision makers in agriculture, personnel selection, health care, accounting/auditing, and management have been observed to share psychological characteristics such as perceptiveness, communication skills, self-confidence, and creativity under stress. These findings have implications for (1) image and expectations of experts, (2) classifying different types of experts, (3) training and/or selecting novices to become experts, and (4) design of expert systems.

Acta Psychologica 68 (1988) 203-215

North-Holland