Success and Failure in Expert Reasoning

Discusses causes of error in real-world problem-solving tasks by considering errors as failures of reasoning and by focusing on human experts as a source of insight into the basis for reasoning errors. A theory of expertise for diagnostic tasks based on the hypothetico-deductive method of reasoning and 2 principles of expertise (called coverage and composition) is described. The task of fraud detection in financial statement auditing is used in computer simulations and in comparison with a sample of 24 auditors who were given the financial statements of a subset of the companies. Results indicate that when neither of the 2 principles is violated, the performance of the resulting model is comparable with that of human auditors who are able to detect fraud. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)