The ironic adverse effects of expertise

Valerie Reyna, professor of human development, found that intelligence agents were more likely to be biased by the wording or framing of risky choice problems than college students or other adults. Her research is quoted in this story in Psychology Today on January 28th.

Experts tend to rely on gist-based representations of situations rather than instead of verbatim ones, in other words, experts are more likely to think of things in a summarized form rather than think about the exact numbers in a step by step fashion. This helps them to make decisions more quickly and to sort relevant from irrelevant information when making decisions. The downside is that they may be more prone to decision-making biases. Read more.