Difference between revisions of "Laymen-experts gap"

Latest revision as of 02:45, 4 December 2016

Laymen and Experts have diffrent levels of knowledge. One of the main chalanges of deliberation is how to bridge this gap. see for instance the two three levels deliberation by Chrisiano 2012^[1]

In some arrays of knowledge some members may have more experience. These members can be experts in a field of knowledge. The group may become gain advantage if it will use the expert’s knowledge. But there are some difficulties. Although people may claim they are experts, their knowledge may not be corroborated. For instance, scholars in social sciences may feel they have superior knowledge about how society should work, but their knowledge may have come from theorizing or from very limited scope research, and the knowledge social science scholars may not work in real life. Researchers from natural sciences may have the feeling that if they understand some phenomena in the animal world, it may be applied to the human society. So the group should use experts’ ideas, but should be critical about it. I will suggest using knowledge from people with real life experience, who have done such things in the past, but again with criticism.

Another difficulty with experts is the gap-knowledge problem. It has two variations. One is that experts may have much subtler knowledge, then laymen. Laymen also, somtimes, are not aware of their Ignorance. Therfore Experts will have difficulties explaining laymen and educate the laymen enough so the laymen will be able to choose and decide in such field of knowledge. The other challenge is that laymen tend to think that they have enough knowledge to decide, although their knowledge may be lacking. Due to the superior knowledge experts have, laymen may be unable to check and criticize experts. Therefore, facilitators of deliberation should devise such settings which will promote critical thinking about experts’ knowledge.

Experts may also introduce in explicit ways knowledge which not only describe the laws of nature, upon the group should decide, but also the values the group should take in the subject. For instance, Marxist theories implies that the world is divided between bad capitalists and poor common people, and that the capitalists or their agents try in further weaken the poor. Although the human world may go along such divided lines, these theories do work on our emotional side and tend to picture the capitalists as bad people. Experts should help us understand how the world is working, but avoid (there is a problem, premature emotional decisions could hamper our ability to clearly understand the subtle situation).

Detecting expertise level

Experts have more procedural knowledge, then laymen. When asked to solve problems, experts retrieve knowledge from long term memory to "long term working memory". Then they have to integrate current information to the working memory to result a solution. Laymen need to load both current information and procedural knowledge into the working memory, thus resulting higher load on the working memory. This overload can be detected by the speed of the solution process, as well as the speed of finding the next step in the solution^[2], and I think someone measured it by pupil dilation.

References