By Dr May Chi, Clinical Psychologist
While I was at university studying psychology, Josh was perfecting the art of stabbing people.
“I love stabbing people,” Josh happily informs my husband and me.
It’s a perfectly reasonable and friendly utterance in the context of asking for his advice on getting our daughter’s ears pierced for her birthday.
Expertise is a highly specific thing. Being good at one thing doesn’t automatically mean that you’re good at everything. This is because expertise is acquired by chunking units of perception and meaning, making recognition of these specific patterns automatic. Experts are faster at recognising and responding to the patterns that they have practised. Outside of these patterns, experts lose their advantage. Even chess experts do not perform better than novices at recalling chess piece positions when the pieces are arranged randomly rather than in relation to a game. Expertise in one domain does not mean general intellectual superiority.
There’s a common misconception that ten thousand hours of doing something makes you an expert at it. But we know from research on expertise that simply showing up is not enough. It takes deliberate practice to reach that next level. Deliberate practice involves naming the skill you want to practice, monitoring your performance, and repeating the practice to improve it. The effective duration of this practice is usually about two hours a day, and four hours maximum. It involves regular access to quality feedback from a coach or supervisor. It is the consistent pursuit of performance above the current comfort level. It is generally not enjoyable.
When I first approached Josh about the subject, I was pretty confident I knew something about how to pierce ears. And then he told me that he only used needles. I was completely stumped. There’s more than one way to piece ears?!
My focus on psychology to the exclusion of many other domains of knowledge means that the world of ear piercing, piercing anything really, is actually a complete mystery to me. Touching people in my profession is generally a no-no. Josh, on the other hand, can do much more than walk a friend through the pros and cons of a needle versus a piercing gun.
Sometimes, people with domain-specific expertise become overvalued and overconfident in unrelated areas. Authority bias is when more value is given to an expert’s opinion, even if that opinion is not within their field of expertise. Among experts themselves, the feeling of proficiency in one area can be misapplied to another; people with credentials may feel that their own views are more authoritative.
“We don’t have to worry about May stabbing things,” Josh assured my husband. “She’ll pull out of the stab halfway through.”
True. This isn’t my domain. I’m going with Josh’s expertise on this one.
