What is an expert?An analysis of the concept of expertise for the purpose of investigating the role of thought in expert

action

Münster, GermanyJanuary 2015

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes possible to make in a very narrow field. —Niels Bohr

Barbara Gail MonteroThe City University of New Yorkbmontero@gc.cuny.edu

• Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler’s (1991) jam-tasting study.

• The researchers’ conclusion: “Analyzing reasons can focus people's attention on nonoptimal criteria.”

• Malcolm Gladwell (2007) puts it more colorfully: “By making people think about jam, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots.”

• However, assuming that the food experts made the best choices, the conclusion should be:

poor choices come not from thinking, but from not being trained how to think.

• Aristotle: we must become morally upstanding

individuals through habit, but if you want to become an expert at ethical behavior you need to develop a theoretical understanding of morality. The Nicomachean Ethics provides this.

• But what does it mean to be an expert?

• Why should the trained food-tasters count, yet not the students? Why is it only after having developed a theoretical background that one should count as an expert in moral action?

A Flotilla of Questions:

• Should we define expertise in reference to some sort of societal standard, perhaps saying that experts are those who have become “professionals” in their field?

• Or should we rely on a test of ability, saying perhaps that, regardless of whether they are recognized as such, experts perform in a relatively superior manner?

• Or might there be an objective standard against

which we should measure expertise?

• Can we define expertise as the attainment of a certain level of skill, such as what on the Fitts (1964) model of skill acquisition counts as the highest level of skill?

• Or should expertise be thought of as the accumulation of knowledge (if one thinks that is different from skill)?

• Is having trained for a certain number of years a necessary component of being an expert?

• Or could an expert be born instead of made?

• Can one become an expert at an activity which does not appear to admit improvement?

• Finally, should expertise be based on performance or ability? (Relevance of performance anxiety)

• The truth of view that experts, when performing at their best, act intuitively, effortlessly and automatically depends in part on how we answer these questions.

No Agreed Upon Definition • There is a vast literature in the cognitive sciences on

expertise, yet there is a considerable amount of disagreement as to what counts as an expert

(Ericsson 2006).

• Sometimes this doesn’t matter.

• Sometimes it does: conclusions formulated in terms of one notion of expertise might, without notice and without warrant, be applied to a very

different conception of an expert.

• This might be what leads Hubert Dreyfus astray.

• The slide: “Once Stuart had worked out the five stages [of expertise] using his driving skills as his example, we just changed car to plane and driver to pilot and wrote a report for the Air Force” (1986, p. 32).

How should I draw the line? • How should I draw the line between the lay driver and

the Indianapolis 500 driver? • No doubt if God were an analytic philosopher, there

would be an illuminating necessary and sufficient condition for what counts as an expert, as well as for a wide number of other weighty concepts.

• Yet, as will become clear as we make our way through

various attempts to define expertise, God is not an analytic philosopher.

• If being an analytic philosopher means divining necessary and sufficient conditions for things neither am I:

• Although I criticize various accounts of expertise for not matching up to certain common sense notions of expertise as well as to how I would like to use the term, my goal is not to come up with the one true conception of expertise.

• That said, since defining the terms of a theory and developing that theory are interdependent, my theory of effortful expertise might effect how we define what it is to be an expert.

The expert as someone who performs automatically

• Guthrie (1952): expertise as “the ability to bring about some end results with maximum certainty and minimum outlay of energy, or of time and energy” (p. 136)

• Dreyfus’s view of everyday driving as expert skill.

• Wulf and Lewthwaite: “relative effortlessness is a defining characteristic of [expert] motor skill” (2010: p. 75).

• See also Fitts & Posner (1967).

The Accumulation of knowledge

• The expert as one who know more… • Experts have accumulated extensive knowledge

about a specific domain. • Earl Hunt: the idea of “an ignorant expert would be

an oxymoron” (2006: p. 31).

• Such a conception of expertise is more promising for my endeavor. However,…

• Although experts often do seem to have copious

amounts of knowledge about a topic, it is not clear that knowledge alone can be used to draw the line between the haves and the have-nots.

• Alvin Goldman (2001), for example, argues that even

expertise in the cognitive real is not just the possession of information but comprises various skills or techniques.

• Goldman distinguishes

Objective sense of expertise: “what it is to be an expert”

Reputational sense of expertise: what it is “to have a reputation for expertise” (p. 91).

• Since, for Goldman, “a reputational expert is

someone widely believed to be an expert (in the

• On his view, experts (in the objective sense) possess not only large amounts of information relevant to their domain of expertise but also have:

the (cognitive) know-how, when presented with a new question in the domain, to go to the right sectors of [their] information-banks and perform appropriate operations on this information; or to deploy some external apparatus or data-banks to disclose relevant material (91-2).

• Might such know-how be part of what it is to posses the information about a topic, or to have knowledge of something?

• If you say you have extensive knowledge of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and I ask you what virtue Britomart represents, you had better be able to access the knowledge you have that provides the answer.

• If you can’t answer that question, you don’t know that Britomart represents Chastity.

• Other examples may better illustrate Goldman’s point:

• Outstanding chess players not only have knowledge in abundance, but have the ability to follow through long chains of moves.

• Bodily expert endeavors: one can know quite a bit about performing a gymnastics routine on the balance beam, yet not be able to do it.

• Is this the kiss of death for the accumulation-of-knowledge definition of expertise?

• Jason Stanley (2011) argues that having a skill

amounts to knowing a fact, but not necessarily a fact that can be expressed descriptively. For example, Stanley argues that when you know how to ride a bike, you know that this is a way to ride a bike, where the ‘this’ refers to a particular way of riding a bike.

• Even if skill can be reduced to knowledge of certain facts, the question remains of how much knowledge is necessary to reach the level of expert skill.

• Goldman thinks that when someone is an expert in an objective sense, this individual possesses superior knowledge, not just superior relative to others but superior from a “God’s eye point of view” (2001: 91).

• Yet how are we to attain a God’s eye point of view? (It’s

hard enough for me to understand the point of view of other philosophers, let alone someone like God, who is not one.)

Reputation• Some researchers take reputation ( based on, for

example, peer) as indicative of expertise.

• Criticisms:

• Shanteau (1988) suggests that peers might be unduly influenced by others’ “outward signs of extreme self-confidence” (p. 211).

• Research by Elstein et al. (1978) indicates that diagnostic skills were no better in a group of physicians that were identified by peers as outstanding compared to a group of undistinguished physicians.

• What standards are being used to determine whether peer nominations are an accurate way of identifying experts?

• Although peer nominations may be used to identify top individuals in a field, my concern is not simply with the crème of the expert crop.

• So it doesn’t work for my purposes.

Domain-related experience

• Expertise is determined by extensive

practice.

Advantage: relatively

straightforward to measure.

• Ericsson points out: “numerous empirical examples were reported where ‘experts’ with extensive experience and extended education were unable to make better decisions than their less skilled peers or even sometimes than their secretaries” (2008: p. 989).

• In any event, this definition doesn’t work for me: habitual actions are the result of years of practice.

Reproducibly Superior performance

• In response to perceived problems with the prior definitions of what it is to be an expert, Ericsson defines expertise in terms of reproducibly superior performance (1991, 2006, 2007, 2008).

• For example, “chess masters-will almost always win chess games against recreational chess players in chess tournaments, medical specialists are far more likely to diagnose a disease correctly than advanced medical students, and professional musicians can perform pieces of music in a manner that is unattainable for less skilled musicians” (2006, p. 3).

What is superior performance?

• Expert performance is “at least than two standard deviations above the mean level in the population” (Ericsson and Charness, 2004: p. 731). (That is, better than approximately 97.725 % of the population at a task.)

• What is the relevant population at issue? • It shouldn’t include the past: Many of today’s’

serious amateur runners are faster than Olympic marathon runners of the distant past .

• The entire living population? It might not be very difficult to be in roughly the top percentile in an activity in which few perform.

• Only those who have engaged in the activity? This would lead to better results for skills in which ability is normally distributed.

• Examples where everyone develops a high degree of skill (by some standard).

• Examples where %1 of relevant population is highly skilled and the rest far less skilled.

• How do we determine whether someone falls into the top percentile of ability?

• Ericsson thinks we can look at representative tasks. But it is not always clear what they are.

• This is especially tricky in a controlled laboratory setting.

The expert as a quick study • Ericsson mentions “it is part of the definition of an

expert performer that they are able to perform at virtually any time with relatively limited preparation.” (2008: p. 989).

• Does it matter how long it takes a musician to rehearse for a performance?

• Sometimes raw speed in action is seen as indicative of expert action.

• However, unless the action itself is one that requires

speed, it is again not clear that this is a reasonable criterion.

• Leonard Cohen took at least four years, he claims, to write the song Hallelujah: “I remember being in the Royalton Hotel on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying, ‘I can’t finish this song.’” (Light, 2012: p.3).

My view: Deliberate Practice and the Desire to Improve• I have questioned definitions of expertise in terms of

automaticity, accumulation of knowledge, peer nominations, domain-related experience, reproducible superior performance, ability to perform with limited preparation, and performance speed.

• “Experts” have engaged in around ten or more years of deliberate practice, which means close to daily, extended practice with the specific aim of improving, and are still intent on improving.

• And I use the term “expertise” to refer to the skill that such individuals have developed.

How can I tell if someone is an expert?• As long as the skill is the result of extended-deliberate

practice and the individual still has the drive to improve, we have an “expert.”

• Information from the individuals themselves, or from biographical information about them (or in my own case, of course, autobiographical information).

• Occasionally I might simply take professional status or recognized national status as indicative of having engaged the relevant practice and having the relevant drive.

• This is far from a perfect indicator, yet I think that it is adequate for my purposes.

Conclusion• In his quest to understand what goes into making an

expert, Ericsson needs an independent criterion for what counts as an expert.

• As my concern is not what goes into making an expert but with what goes on in the mind of the expert in action, I can, without circularity, simply co-opt Ericsson’s findings and build them into my definition of expertise.

• And that’s what I do: experts are those who have engaged in around ten or more years of deliberate practice and are still passionate about improving.

• The just-do-it principle is false when applied to such individuals.