Expert Blindness

In the book Wait by Frank Partnoy, there is a description of an experiment where chess experts were shown a chess board with checkmate for one of the players achievable in three moves, but the moves are non-standard and counter-intuitive to typical play by experts at the game. After less than a minute the chess experts tended to see the solution. Then, the experimenters did a similar test that contained the same three-move checkmate possibility, but also contained a five-move possibility that was familiar to expert players. In this scenario, the players noticed the five-move option immediately, but only half of the best players saw the three-move option, even fewer of lower level experts. These subjects were then shown the board as it was set up in the original experiment (with no familiar five-move solution available) and they still tended to not be able to see the three-move solution.

What this seems to show is that experts also have biases just like everyone else. To be able to adopt to accept new information and then change a previous determination that incorporates that new information is not only difficult, but for some people it's literally impossible.

I think this is one major reason why relying on "experts" to make sense of new information is always going to be problematic. Not only is there a self-protection bias, but there is a good chance they literally can't see it. It's probably even worse for those who assign themselves the "expert" label when it's undeserved.

"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been...into every corner of our minds." -John Maynard Keynes