The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

Book Preface

Expert, Expertise, and Expert Performance: Dictionary Definitions
Encyclopedias describe an Expert as “one who is very skillful and well-informed in some special field” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1968, p. 168), or “someone widely recognized as a reliable source of knowledge, technique, or skill whose judgment is accorded authority and status by the public or his or her peers. Experts have prolonged or intense experience through practice and education in a particular field” (Wikipedia). Expertise then refers to the characteristics, skills, and knowledge that distinguish experts from novices and less experienced people. In some domains there are objective criteria for finding experts, who are consistently able to exhibit superior performance for representative tasks in a domain. 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. These types of superior reproducible performances on representative tasks capture the essence of the respective domains, and authors have been encouraged to refer to them as Expert Performance in this and the original handbook.
It has been known for some time that in some domains it is difficult for non-experts to identify experts, and consequently researchers rely on peer-nominations by professionals in the same domain. However, people recognized by their peers as experts do not always display superior performance on domain-related tasks. Sometimes they are no better than novices even on tasks that are central to the expertise, such as selecting stocks with superior future value, treatment of psychotherapy patients, and forecasts (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). There are several domains where experts disagree and make inconsistent recommendations for action, such as recommending selling versus buying the same stock. For example, expert auditors’ assessments have been found to differ more from each other than the assessments of less experienced auditors (Bédard, 1991). Furthermore, experts will sometimes acquire differences from novices and other people as a function of their repetitive routines, that is, as a consequence of their extended experience rather than a cause for their superior performance. For example, medical doctors’ handwriting is less legible than that of other health professionals (Lyons, Payne, McCabe, & Fielder, 1998). In sum, Shanteau (1988) suggested that “experts” may not need a proven record of performance and can adopt a particular image and project “outwards signs of extreme self-confidence” (p. 211) to get clients to listen to them and continue to offer advice after negative outcomes. After all, the experts are nearly always the best qualified to evaluate their own performance and explain the reasons for any deviant outcomes.
When the proposal for the first edition of the handbook was originally prepared, the outline focused more narrowly on the structure and acquisition of highly superior (expert) performance in many different domains (Ericsson, 1996, 2004). In response to the requests of the reviewers of that proposal, the final outline of the handbook covered a broader field that included research on the development of expertise and how highly experienced individuals accumulate knowledge in their respective domains and eventually become socially recognized experts and masters. Consequently, to reflect the scope of the handbook it was entitled The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. The first edition of the handbook thus included a multitude of conceptions of expertise, including perspectives from education, sociology, and computer science, along with the more numerous perspectives from psychology emphasizing basic abilities, knowledge, and acquired skills. In this second edition there is an even more committed effort to include new perspectives, such as the evolution of expertise over many millennia, the phenomenology of expertise, and even the concept of expertise in non-human animals, such as service dogs and dogs herding sheep. In this introductory chapter, I will briefly introduce some general issues and describe the structure and content of the handbook as it was approved by Cambridge University Press.