Expertise and Ease-of-Recall Heuristic

Perceived Expertise and the Informational Value of Recall Experiences

In the preceding studies, the informational value of recall experiences was manipulated by drawing participants’ attention to an external source that allegedly facilitated or inhibited recall. The same logic, however, applies to an individual difference variable, namely one’s perceived expertise in the respective content domain. Suppose you are asked to list 12 famous Spanish matadors and find this task difficult. Chances are that you would not conclude that there are not many famous Spanish matadors; instead, you would blame your own lack of expertise for the experienced difficulty, thus undermining its informational value. As this example illustrates, individuals may only rely on recall experiences when they consider themselves at least moderately knowledgeable in the relevant content domain. Experimental data support this conclusion.

For example, Biller, Bless, & Schwarz (1992) had participants recall either 3 (easy) or 9 (difficult) examples of chronic diseases and subsequently asked them to estimate the percentage of Germans who suffer from chronic diseases. As expected, they estimated the prevalence of chronic diseases to be higher after recalling 3 (M = 38.3%) rather than 9 (M = 25.2%) examples, reflecting that they based their judgments on experienced ease of recall. To explore the role of perceived expertise, other participants were first asked to indicate how much they know about chronic diseases before they were asked to provide a prevalence estimate. The knowledge question was expected to draw their attention to their general lack of knowledge in this domain, thus undermining the informational value of their recall experiences. In this case, participants estimated the prevalence of chronic diseases to be lower after recalling 3 (M = 23.1%) rather than 9 (M = 33.0%) examples, reflecting that they based their judgments on the number of examples recalled.

These findings suggest that people rely on their subjective recall experiences only when they consider themselves knowledgeable, but turn to recalled content when they do not (see also Schwarz & Schuman, 1997). Extending this line of research, Vaughn (1997) explored the role of a particular kind of expertise, namely schematicity with regard to a personality trait (Markus, 1977). Specifically, she asked assertiveness schematics (who are considered experts on this trait) and aschematics (nonexperts) to recall either 3 or 8 examples of their own assertive behavior. As expected, assertiveness schematics based their self-assessments on their subjective recall experience and reported higher assertiveness after recalling 3 (easy) rather than 8 (difficult) examples. Conversely, assertiveness aschematics discounted their subjective accessibility experience and based their self-assessments on recalled information, reporting higher assertiveness after recalling 8 rather than 3 examples.

In combination, these studies indicate that perceived knowledgeability is a crucial prerequisite for reliance on experienced ease of recall as a source of information. When people are aware, or are made aware, of a lack of knowledge in the respective domain, the diagnostic value of recall experiences is called into question, much as is the case when their attention is drawn to external factors likely to influence their recall experience.