Organization and Strategy Online Seminar（2020-07）

Topic: The Fragility Of Experts: A Moderated-Mediation Model Of Expertise, Expert Identity Threat, And Overprecision

Speaker: Sanghoon (Hoonie) Kang,Rutgers Business School

Time: Tuesday, 22 Sep, 09:00-10:30 am

Location: Teams Online conference room Join the Meeting

Abstract:

This research examines experts’tendency to show greater overprecision, a robust but understudied type of overconfidence, when their expert identity is threatened by disconfirming feedback. While experts are better equipped to offer informative and accurate judgments than novices, we argue that internal motivations to protect self-integrity lead them to respond to negative performance feedback by providing overly precise predictions. A series of lab experiments show that (a) experts are more likely than novices to double-down and produce overprecise predictions following disconfirming feedback; (b) this feedback induced over precision by experts is mediated by perceived level of expert identity threat; (c) the source of the feedback (i.e., other experts, novices, actual outcomes) matter for identity threat and overprecision; and (d) self-affirmation attenuate identity threat and reduced overprecision. We supplement these experimental findings by investigating experts’response to disconfirming feedback in two real-world settings: Major League Baseball umpiring and Chief Financial Officer predictions of stock market returns. Ultimately, we propose a moderated-mediation model of expert decision-making to understand“when”and“why”experts offer overly precise judgments, and“how”experts can cope with disconfirming feedback that is unavoidable and prevalent in organizational settings.

Introduction:

I am a Ph.D candidate at Rutgers Business School. My primary research interest is on decision-making, cognitive biases (e.g., self-enhancement and overconfidence) and mitigation strategies (e.g., nudge). In one stream, I focus on how people’s egos detrimentally impact their judgmental accuracy. My dissertation, entitled“Fragility of expertise: Doubling down and revising”(Received 2ndRound Revise and Resubmit Decision atAcademy of Management Journal), explores experts’tendencies to become defensive when challenged through notification of errors, by becoming more overprecise to boost their self-worth as experts.

My other research interests include investigating the relationship between (1) status and people’s defensiveness (with two papers currently under review), and (2) modern technology and people’s cognitive depletion and negotiation performance (with two papers already published:“The effect of e-communication richness on negotiation performances: Screen size, video, and text in negotiations”atGroup Decision and Negotiationin 2018;“Reach for your cell phone at your own risk: The cognitive costs of media choice for breaks”atJournal of Behavioral Addictionsin 2019).

Your participation is warmly welcomed!