The Curse of Expertise: The Effects of Expertise and Debiasing Methods on Predictions of Novice Performance

Experts are often called on to predict the performance of novices, but cognitive heuristics may interfere with experts' ability to capitalize on their superior knowledge hi predicting novice task performance. In Study 1, experts, intermediate users, and novices predicted the time it would take novices to complete a complex task. In Study 2, expertise was experimentally manipulated. In both studies, those with more expertise were worse predictors of novice performance times and were resistant to debiasing techniques intended to reduce underestimation. Findings from these studies suggest that experts may have a cognitive handicap that leads to underestimating the difficulty novices face and that those with an intermediate level of expertise may be more accurate in predicting novices' performance.