title: Expert intuitions: how to model the decision strategies of airport customs officers?
abstract: How does expertise impact the selection of decision strategies? We asked airport customs officers and a novice control group to decide which passengers (described on several cue dimensions) they would submit to a search. Additionally, participants estimated the validities of the different cues. Then we modeled the decisions using compensatory strategies, which integrate many cues, and a noncompensatory heuristic, which relies on one-reason decision making. The majority of the customs officers were best described by the noncompensatory heuristic, whereas the majority of the novices were best described by a compensatory strategy. We also found that the experts' subjective cue validity estimates showed a higher dispersion across the cues and that differences in cue dispersion partially mediated differences in strategy use between experts and novices. Our results suggest that experts often rely on one-reason decision making and that expert-novice differences in strategy selection may reflect a response to the internal representation of the environment.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. pachur@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
authors.forename: Thorsten
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Pachur
authors.forename: Gianmarco
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Marinello
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D059028:Airports; D003463:Cues; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019545:Intuition; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D008960:Models, Psychological; D013660:Taxes; D014195:Travel; D014481:United States; D000078329:Workforce
keywords: 2340; 3430; Customs; Decision strategies; Expertise; Heuristics; Strategy selection