| Summary: | Expertise is a reliable
cue for accuracy – experts are often correct in their judgments and opinions.
However, the opposite is not necessarily the case – ignorant judges are not
guaranteed to err. Specifically, in a question with a dichotomous response
option, an ignorant responder has a 50% chance of being correct. In five
studies, we show that people fail to understand this, and that they
overgeneralize a sound heuristic (expertise signals accuracy) to cases where it
does not apply (lack of expertise does not imply error). These studies show
that people 1) tend to think that the responses of an ignorant person to
dichotomous-response questions are more likely to be incorrect than correct,
and 2) they tend to respond the opposite of what the ignorant person responded.
This research also shows that this bias is at least partially intuitive in
nature, as it manifests more clearly in quick gut responses than in slow
careful responses. Still, it is not completely corrected upon careful
deliberation. Implications are discussed for rationality and epistemic
vigilance.
|
|---|