The Psychology Of Expertise

Mieg's book, in our LEA Expertise series, will cover the issues of expertise and relate them to experts' roles in psychology, organizational studies, and sociology.

Table of contents

Offering the broadest review of psychological perspectives on human expertise to date, this volume covers behavioral, computational, neural, and genetic approaches to understanding complex skill. The chapters show how performance in music, the arts, sports, games, medicine, and other domains reflects basic traits such as personality and intelligence, as well as knowledge and skills acquired through training. In doing so, this book moves the field of expertise beyond the duality of "nature vs. nurture" toward an integrative understanding of complex skill. This book is an invaluable resource for researchers and students interested in expertise, and for professionals seeking current reviews of psychological research on expertise.

This book was the first handbook where the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries. In 15 major domains of expertise, the leading researchers summarize our knowledge on the structure and acquisition of expert skill and knowledge and discuss future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.

This volume investigates our ability to capture, and then apply, expertise. In recent years, expertise has come to be regarded as an increasingly valuable and surprisingly elusive resource. Experts, who were the sole active dispensers of certain kinds of knowledge in the days before AI, have themselves become the objects of empirical inquiry, in which their knowledge is elicited and studied -- by knowledge engineers, experimental psychologists, applied psychologists, or other experts -- involved in the development of expert systems. This book achieves a marriage between experimentalists, applied scientists, and theoreticians who deal with expertise. It envisions the benefits to society of an advanced technology for capturing and disseminating the knowledge and skills of the best corporate managers, the most seasoned pilots, and the most renowned medical diagnosticians. This book should be of interest to psychologists as well as to knowledge engineers who are "out in the trenches" developing expert systems, and anyone pondering the nature of expertise and the question of how it can be elicited and studied scientifically. The book's scope and the pivotal concepts that it elucidates and appraises, as well as the extensive categorized bibliographies it includes, make this volume a landmark in the field of expert systems and AI as well as the field of applied experimental psychology.

The study of expertise weaves its way through various communities of practice, across disciplines, and over millennia. To date, the study of expertise has been primarily concerned with how human beings perform at a superior level in complex environments and sociotechnical systems, and at the highest levels of proficiency. However, more recent research has continued the search for better descriptions, and causal mechanisms that explain the complexities of expertise in context, with a view to translating this understanding into useful predictions and interventions capable of improving the performance of human systems as efficiently as possible. The Oxford Handbook of Expertise provides a comprehensive picture of the field of Expertise Studies. It offers both traditional and contemporary perspectives, and importantly, a multidiscipline-multimethod view of the science and engineering research on expertise. The book presents different perspectives, theories, and methods of conducting expertise research, all of which have had an impact in helping us better understand expertise across a broad range of domains. The Handbook also describes how researchers and practitioners have addressed practical problems and societal challenges. Throughout, the authors have sought to demonstrate the heterogeneity of approaches and conceptions of expertise, to place current views of expertise in context, to show how these views can be used to address current issues, and to examine ways to advance the study of expertise. The Oxford Handbook of Expertise is an essential resource both to those wanting to gain an up-to-date knowledge of the science of expertise and those wishing to study experts.

Due largely to developments made in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology during the past two decades, expertise has become an important subject for scholarly investigations. The Nature of Expertise displays the variety of domains and human activities to which the study of expertise has been applied, and reflects growing attention on learning and the acquisition of expertise. Applying approaches influenced by such disciplines as cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, the contributors discuss those conditions that enhance and those that limit the development of high levels of cognitive skill.

The Social Psychology of Expertise offers an integrative perspective to the analysis of experts and expertise in organizations, social roles, management, etc. It is the first book to link the psychology of expertise to sociology, particularly the sociology of professions. By examining the converging elements of both approaches and investigating the conditions of interactions with all types of experts, The Social Psychology of Expertise makes it possible to understand the market form of expert services. This book: *introduces the expert role approach--a new and encompassing view on the role of experts and how to use the experts' expertise in organizations, financial markets, and environmental issues; *enhances a mutual understanding between the psychology of expertise and the sociology of professions (for students, as well as scholars); *provides a helpful understanding of dealing with experts in the context of organizational behavior; *shows how we can make proper use of the experts' expertise in management and planning; *demonstrates how the role of experts influences volatility in financial markets; and *defines the limits of human expertise in predicting climate change.

The Neuroscience of Expertise examines the ways in which the brain accommodates the incredible feats of experts. It builds on a tradition of cognitive research to explain how the processes of perception, attention, and memory come together to enable experts' outstanding performance. The text explains how the brain adapts to enable the complex cognitive machinery behind expertise, and provides a unifying framework to illuminate the seemingly unconnected performance of experts in different domains. Whether it is a radiologist who must spot a pathology in a split second, a chess grandmaster who finds the right path in a jungle of possible continuations, or a tennis professional who reacts impossibly quickly to return a serve, The Neuroscience of Expertise offers insight into the universal cognitive and neural mechanisms behind these achievements.

Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.