The Pros and Cons of Expertise: Routine Strength and Adaptation in Recurrent Acquisition and Disposal Decisions

The strength of decision routines was manipulated within a computer controlled micro-world simulation which required that participants make recurrent acquisition and disposal decisions. One week after having learned weak or strong routines, participants were confronted with changes in this micro- world that rendered the routine obsolete. The duration of routine maintenance was assessed as a dependent variable. The decision task was characterized by the lack of any constraints. Participants wre free to consider new evidence that reliably indicated the inadequacy of the routine. Results show that routines can overrule new evidence if they are strong (i.e. have been repeated frequently in the past), yielding delays in adaptive routine deviation. This, however, did not lead to maladaptive behavior in the long run, which indicates that strong routine participants profit from higher expertise compared to weak routine participants. Results are discussed with reference to theories which embody assumptions about the interaction between prior knowledge and new evidence on decision making.