Does expertise protect?

“Does expertise protect”Does expertise protect against overclaiming false knowledge?“

Highlights

• True experts are less likely to overclaim knowledge they do not have.
• Self-perceived experts are more likely to overclaim knowledge they do not have.
• Expertise protects against overclaiming more when self-perceived expertise is high.
• Experts make knowledge judgments more automatically.

Recognizing one’s ignorance is a fundamental skill. We ask whether superior background knowledge or expertise improves the ability to distinguish what one knows from what one does not know, i.e., whether expertise leads to superior meta-knowledge. Supporting this hypothesis, we find that the more a person knows about a topic, the less likely they are to “overclaim” knowledge of nonexistent terms in that topic. Moreover, such expertise protects against overclaiming especially when people are most prone to overclaim – when they view themselves subjectively as experts. We find support for these conclusions in an internal meta-analysis, in comparisons of experts and novices in medicine and developmental psychology, and in an experiment manipulating expertise.
Finally, we find that more knowledgeable people make knowledge judgments more automatically, which is related to less false familiarity and more accurate recognition. In contrast, their less knowledgeable peers are more likely to deliberate about their knowledge judgments, potentially thinking their way into false familiarity.
Whereas feeling like an expert predisposes one to overclaim impossible knowledge, true expertise provides a modest protection against doing so.

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Overclaiming was initially conceptualized as an individual difference useful for screening job candidates. Those who assert knowing something about plates of parallax, the logic went, tend to lie about their knowledge and skills. However, later work has shown that these overclaiming beliefs are at least partly authentic and demonstrate honest reporting. For example, people continue to overclaim after being warned that some of the terms do not exist, and even when incentivized to be truthful. Overclaiming is also generally unrelated to well established measures of faking. Thus, rather than reflecting the faking of knowledge, overclaiming at least partly reflects people being mistaken about their knowledge.
One reason people make such meta-knowledge mistakes is their reliance on heuristics.

Genuine expertise and self-perceived expertise are often positively correlated, such that people who are more knowledgeable have greater self-perceptions of expertise. However, that relationship is often weak, with self-perception and reality diverging sharply. Two people who think themselves experts to the same degree can nevertheless possess very different levels of expertise when measured by objective criteria, and two people who prove themselves similarly knowledgeable may have different levels of self-perceived expertise. By definition, experts know more than novices or laypeople (i.e., they have high genuine expertise) but also tend to view themselves as experts (i.e., have high self-perceived expertise). It is therefore unclear whether experts would tend to overclaim less or more. Moreover, if both self-perceptions of expertise and genuine levels of expertise are related to overclaiming, which of the two is more critical to take into account to predict a target’s likelihood of overclaiming?

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To perform well, managers and employees must not only possess the relevant knowledge, but also be able to recognize which knowledge they do and do not have, and therefore which tasks they are and aren’t qualified to perform, when they need advice, etc.

Having more expert knowledge about a topic helped people identify what they didn’t know about that topic.

Three additional findings about expertise and false familiarity are noteworthy.
First, reassuringly, both experts and novices consistently found the nonexistent items less familiar than the real items, suggesting that people can generally differentiate between concepts about which they know more versus less.
Second, despite this, false familiarity was common even among experts, with 38.8 % of medical doctors indicating they had some knowledge of at least one of the nonexistent medical terms, and 83 % of faculty members in developmental psychology indicating they had some knowledge of at least one of the nonexistent developmental psychology terms. This is striking given that the overclaiming measure provides a conservative estimate of knowledge overestimation, as it relies on asking about nonexistent items; it does not capture overestimating knowledge of real items, which likely occurs as well. Actual knowledge overestimation is likely even higher than we captured in our studies.
Third, the protective effect of expertise against overclaiming was detectable but modest. In fact, it was much smaller than the opposing effect of self-perceived expertise, which is associated with increased overclaiming. Given the overlap between genuine expertise and self-perceived expertise, the latter’s substantial effect on overclaiming may sometimes overshadow the modest protective influence of the former.

The protective buffer that genuine expertise provides is smaller than the effect of self-perceived expertise in part because positive self-beliefs about expertise must first appear before the protective effect of expertise can be triggered.
Genuine and self-perceived expertise interact.
The protective effect of genuine expertise is greatest when self-perceived expertise is high and the potential for overclaiming is at its greatest. When self-perceived expertise is low, people show little overclaiming and there is no overclaiming effect for genuine expertise to buffer. The net effect of this pattern is that the protective effect of genuine expertise may be modest, but it is its strongest under conditions most likely to produce overclaiming.

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One open question is the role of motivated reasoning in overclaiming.
Motivated reasoning is the host of cognitive processes whereby conclusions are influenced by desired outcomes.

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“An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you do not”

William Feather
(cited in Blain, R. (1956). The plant man’s notebook. Telephony, 150)

Gaining genuine expertise provides at least a small measure of help in attaining that true education.