Summary
No matter what domain, the judgment of performance occupies a key area of investment. Experts are trained and societal institutions are constructed to identify, develop, and reward the highest levels of achievement. We trust that professionals can judge performance through their specialized knowledge. Yet, experts are just as vulnerable as novices to the dominance of visual information (vision heuristic) and the influence of beliefs about the source of achievement on the perception and judgment of talent (naturalness bias). Given their effect on professional evaluation and decision-making, such biases can affect how organizations select and recruit top talent.
Relevance
The implications of these findings extend to any context that calls for the professional judgment of performance. When professional decisions involve other information that are actually more predictive of performance, the research suggests that we must be more mindful of our inclination to depend on certain types of information at the expense of the content that we actually value as more relevant to our decisions, as such dependence may not lead to wise decisions and good long-term investments in selecting, promoting, and rewarding talent.
Selected publications
Link to the publication’s UCL Discovery page