Does gist drive NASA experts’ design decisions?

Deniz Marti and David A. Broniatowski

Systems Engineering, 2020, vol. 23, issue 4, 460-479

Abstract: As engineers retire from practice, they must transfer their expertise to new recruits. Typically, this is accomplished using decision‐support systems that communicate precise probabilities. However, Fuzzy‐Trace Theory (FTT) predicts that the most experts prefer to rely on “gist” representations of risk over “verbatim” representations. We conducted a survey of 41 NASA employees (whose mathematical abilities are a prerequisite for their jobs) and 233 nonexperts. We tested whether experts designing space missions under the micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) impact – rely more on qualitative or quantitative risk representations. We tested three hypotheses: gist and verbatim representations of MMOD risk are distinct for both experts and nonexperts; gist representations are more predictive of decisions than are verbatim representations; and providing nonexperts with a bottom‐line meaning change their gists more than verbatim information does. Results support FTT's predictions: gist and verbatim representations were distinct, and gist representations were associated with decisions for both experts and nonexperts. We did not observe an association between quantitative risk estimates and decisions for either experts or nonexperts. We observed that exposing a nonexpert to an expert's gist modified that nonexpert's gist yet exposing quantitative risk information did not. Implications for expertise transfer are discussed.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21538

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:syseng:v:23:y:2020:i:4:p:460-479

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Systems Engineering from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().