Expert—Novice Differences in Person Perception: Evidence of Experts' Sensitivities to the Organization of Behavior

Abstract

This article demonstrates that features identified in the classic expertise literature are shared by experts in the domain of social cognition. Clinical novices and experts were presented with multiple observations of children's behaviors and the situations in which they occurred. Three types of target personalities were created: a prototypical aggressive target whose behavior patterns corresponded to those displayed by actual aggressive children in natural social situations; an inverse target whose behaviors systematically violated those of the aggressive target; and a random target whose behaviors did not vary systematically across situations. Performances of experts and novices were examined in recall, prediction, and impression formation tasks. Experts and novices did not differ in recall as measured by a free recall task, but the experts' predictions of targets' behaviors were more closely tied to actual behavior than novices' predictions for both the aggressive and inverse targets. As predicted, the accuracy of experts' and novices' predictions was comparable for the random target, whose behaviors did not vary systematically over situations. The results suggest that a key element of clinical expertise is the ability to detect patterns of covariation between antecedent events and target behaviors. Like experts in highly structured domains, clinical experts appeared to encode target information at a more abstract level than novices did and displayed more flexibility in interpreting theory-inconsistent information. We discuss the relation between these findings and previous evidence of clinicians' inferential shortcomings.