Expert Decision Makers

Have you ever wondered what separates expert decision makers from average ones?  Rosen, Salas, Lyons, and Fiore (2008) have developed a list of mechanisms that characterize expert decision making.  They include (p. 216):

1. Are tightly coupled to cues and contextual features of the environment.
   • They develop psychological and physiological adaptations to the task environment.
   • They are sensitive to and leverage contextual patterns of cues in decision making.
2. Have a larger knowledge base and organize it differently from non-experts.
   • They have a more conceptually organized knowledge base.
   • They have more robust connections between aspects of their knowledge.
   • They have a more abstracted and functional knowledge base.
3. Engage in pattern recognition.
   • They perceive larger and more meaningful patterns in the environment.
   • They are able to detect subtle cue configurations.
   • They are able to retrieve courses of action based on situation/action matching rules.
4. Engage in deliberate and guided practice.
   • They devote time and effort to improving knowledge and skills.
   • They have high motivation to learn and long term learning goals.
5. Seek diagnostic feedback.
   • They seek out input from other experts.
   • They self-diagnose their performance, indentify weaknesses in their knowledge and processes, and correct them.
6. Have better situation assessment and problem representations.
   • They spend more time evaluating the situation.
   • They create deeper, more conceptual, more functional, and more abstracted situation representations.
7. Have specialized memory skills.
   • They functionally increase their ability to handle large amounts of information.
   • They anticipate what information will be needed in the decision making.
8. Automate the small skills.
   • They quickly and effortlessly do what requires large amounts of attention for non-experts.
   • They have more cognitive resources available for dealing with more complex aspects of decision making.
9. Self-regulate and monitor their progress.
   • They evaluate their own understanding of a situation.
   • They judge the consistency, reliability, and completeness of their information.
   • They make good decisions about when to stop evaluating the situation.

References

Rosen, M.A., Salas, E., Lyons, R., & Fiore, S.M. (2008).  Expertise and naturalistic decision making in organizations: Mechanisms of effective decision making.  In G.P. Hodgkinson & W.H. Starbuck (Eds.), The oxford handbook of organizational decision making (pp. 211-230).  New York: Oxford University Press.