A Sharp Test of the Portability of Expertise ∗

We measure the contextual dependence of expertise by observing experts perform a task conceptually identical to—but contextually distinct from—the task in which they are experienced. We find that these experts fail to apply their expertise in the decontextualized environment, indicating that unfamiliarity restricts the portability of expertise. However, we also find that the experts improve with repetition in the new setting—and more quickly than comparably able novices—suggesting that experts learn to apply their expertise on the initially foreign task. ∗We thank seminar participants at Microsoft Research, Jenn Wortman Vaughan in particular, as well as Jim Andreoni, Hengchen Dai, David Reiley, Joe Simmons, and Charlie Sprenger, for helpful comments and suggestions. We are grateful to Henry Abbott, Kevin Arnovitz, and Royce Webb for creating panels of experts and novices, and for inviting us to work with them on their polling. We also thank Microsoft Research for generous financial support. †[email protected] ‡[email protected] §[email protected]