Experts are good at recognizing each other. Reference, please?

June 9, 2008 9:55 AM

I once read that said experts were good at identifying each other. Can you help me find a reference to this factoid?

The study (at least, I think it was a study) was on the problem of identifying experts in any particular field. The criteria can be fuzzy and difficult to operationalize. The study said that experts could quickly identify each other, often in conversational settings. Non-experts don't have this ability. What I've described is the gist of the study, and I very likely have gotten details wrong.

I don't remember what field the paper was from, but I have a feeling it wasn't psychology. I'm not sure if I read the paper or read about the study elsewhere, e.g. a magazine article or a book. I have looked at the entry on expertise on wikipedia, and while it was very interesting, it didn't help.

Any pointers that can get me closer will be useful and I can do more digging.

posted by mausburger to Science & Nature (3 answers total)

Shoot, I remember reading the same thing, but I can't recall where or when. I tried searching too, and the closest I was able to get was a couple of abstracts on the topic of expertise and how people recognize it in interactions with others, and an interview with one of the authors where he gives an overview of the sort of experiments they conducted:

"Technical decision-making is often a matter of debating in committees and the like, so the way expertise works itself out in conversation was always going to be a central concern. We decided to use the forerunner of the "Turing test"—the "imitation game"—to see whether one kind of expert could be distinguished from another in conversational tests. In the imitation game, a judge asks open-ended questions of, say, a full-blown expert and someone with interactional expertise only, without knowing who is who. The judge tries to tell the difference."

I'm not sure if this is related to that factoid, though.
posted by wam at 11:53 AM on June 9, 2008

Thanks for the pointers and for confirming that I'm not crazy. :)
posted by mausburger at 12:09 PM on June 9, 2008

I know this is pretty vague, but in The Black Swan, Taleb mentions a guy, a psychologist, whose expertise is experts. I'd tell you who if I hadn't lent my copy to someone else. The name of the expert expert is mentioned several times and I think there's a bibliography too.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:43 PM on June 9, 2008