Normative and Substantive Expertise in Multiple Hypotheses Evaluation

Memory & Cognition, 2000

would also like to thank Gerd Gigerenzer, John Wixted, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful critiques of an earlier version of this manuscript. Special thanks to Dominique Boutet and the students at IUT of Bretigny sur Orge for their participation in the Experiments.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

Although experts are valuable assets to organizations, they suffer from the curse of knowledge and cognitive entrenchment, which prevents them from being able to adapt to changing situational demands. In this study, I propose that experts' performance goal orientation resulting from pressures to perform contributes to their flexibility, but this mechanism can be moderated by learning goal orientation and humility. Data from a small sample of healthcare professionals suggested that performance goal orientation partially explained the mechanism of why experts may be inflexible. Humility, both as self-report and other-report measures, was found to be the most consistent moderator of this indirect effect. Experts with low levels of humility suffered from the negative effects of performance goal orientation, leading them to be less flexible compared to their counterparts with higher levels of humility. Experts who reported high levels of humility, on the other hand, were perceived to be more flexible as their expertise increased. Meanwhile, learning goal orientation partially moderated the indirect effect of expertise on flexibility through performance goal orientation. These findings lead to new conversations on how to get experts unstuck and highlight the importance of developing humility as both a personal virtue and a strategic advantage for organizations.

Accounting and finance, 2004

The present study extends prior research relating to auditors' analytical procedures (AP) processes in two ways. First, it examines whether the timing of receipt of an inherited explanation (before or after self-generating explanations) affects auditors' hypothesis generation. Second, responding to calls to address how the auditors' performance of the earlier stages of the AP process affects their performance in later stages of that process (Koonce, 1993; Cohen, Krishnamoorthy and Wright, 2000) the present study concurrently addresses the hypothesis generation, information search, hypothesis evaluation and final judgement stages of the AP process. Consistent with a facilitation effect, more non-error explanations were generated by auditors initially inheriting a nonerror explanation. Further, consistent with a recency effect, the initial likelihood assessed for the inherited explanation was higher when it was received after self-generation of alternatives. Despite these initial differences, the timing of the inherited explanation did not significantly affect the auditors' information search, evaluation processes or outcome performance (in terms of cause selection). Results relating to the receipt of an inherited explanation were similar, except that significantly fewer subjects not inheriting an explanation selected a cause the same as the inherited explanation. These results suggest that although inheriting an explanation from management does affect the outcome of the AP process, it does not lead to fewer correct outcomes, and highlight the importance of examining the AP process in its entirety rather than in a piecemeal manner.