Abstract
In research on decision making there are two views about experts. One view, which emerges from behavioral research on decision making, is skeptical about the experts. The second view, stemming from research in cognitive science, suggests that expertise is a rare skill that develops only after much instruction, practice, and experience.
Behavioral and cognitive science approaches have different goals: Whereas behavioral decision theory emphasizes the performance of experts, cognitive science usually emphasizes differences in experts' processes.
The chapter is organized as follows: In section 2 we review what we currently know about how well experts perform decision tasks, then in section 3 we review recent work on expert decision processes. Section 4 integrates the views described in sections 2 and 3. Then we examine the implications of this work for decision research and for the study of expertise in general.