COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Introduction

Expertise is based on knowledge. But is it the same? There are doubts. Expertise has its specific developmental aspect—we have to train to become experts. In contrast, knowledge per se seems to have an impersonal, transpersonal quality. Speaking of cognitive problems, Rescher, as a philosopher, did not refer to individual problems of cognition, but to a general problem of rationality. The general question “How can cognition be considered both human and rational?” is remarkably fundamental. In this research, I can only touch it but not thoroughly explore it. Instead, we look at human expertise as the basis of a society's knowledge and its exchange. In this study, we enter a discussion on the role of experts and on rendering cognitive expertise accessible a discussion similar to the discussion on knowledge exchange with thinker. From the point of view of social psychology, we consider both the inner, psychological side of expertise and it's outside the social function of expertise. In particular, we have to ask: “How can knowledge exchange be considered both an instance of individual expertise and the realization of a social function?” Obviously, expertise concerns a person and a function. The remainder of this chapter acquaints the reader with:

how our question is linked to the discussion of expertise in current psychology,

how we can tackle it from a social psychology point of view, and

the rationale and content of The Social Psychology of Expertise.

Expertise

What is an expert? Experts in the original literal sense are experimentalists: They know from active, reflexive experience. Accepting this definition as a starting point, we can ask: What is special as to experts? Does not everybody know from more or less reflexive—experience? The Nature of Expertise, a textbook on the cognitive psychology of expertise edited by Chi, Glaser, and Farr (1988), started with the introductory question, “How do we identify a person as exceptional or gifted?” (Agnew, Ford & Hayes, 1997). This kind of question leads us into a differential approach, comparing experts with nonexperts. From a psychological point of view, there are two further directions. First, we can look for differences in personality: where experts excel in intelligence, reasoning strategies, or cognitive information-processing capabilities. Second, we can look for differences in learning conditions such as training and schooling or cognitive stimulation. In addition, we can mix both approaches and describe expertise as the result of a specific developmental, learning-based process that shapes a personality—the expert.

We find this differential approach with K. Anders Ericsson. In his book, Towards a General Theory of Expertise (edited with J. Smith in 1991), he wrote,

[T]he study of expertise seeks to understand and account for what distinguishes outstanding individuals in a domain from less outstanding individuals in that domain, as well as from people in general. (Ericsson & Smith 1991a, p. 2)

Ericsson limited his approach to the study of cases, in which the outstanding behavior can be attributed to relatively stable characteristics of the relevant ...