Vox Peritorum: Capitalizing on Confidence and Projection to Characterize Expertise

Theory and research seek to isolate the properties of experts in judgment and decision-making tasks. Confidence in judgment and social projection have emerged as two important meta-judgmental markers. The joint utility of these two indicators of expertise has not been considered yet. We show that the joint study of individual and contextual differences in confidence and projection offers new opportunities to understand expertise. Our theoretical premise is that experts can solve difficult tasks, and do so with high confidence while knowing that few others accomplish this. In a reanalysis of data from Prelec and colleagues (2017) we show that expert judgments are accompanied by higher confidence and less social projection than judgments made by non-experts. Only among experts, confidence and projection are weakly correlated. Moreover, experts align their rate of projection with the difficulty of the judgment task. The present results support a new and integrative approach to the study of experts and expert judgment. We discuss the limitations of the present work and point to future research questions.