#ThinkfullyHabit: Stop cherry picking
Expertise can’t always help us make wiser decisions. Sometimes, it actually gets in our way. This happens if we trip up on the details we’ve cherry picked out as being important, at the expense of the bigger picture.
Take the story of Abraham Bredius, one of the world’s leading experts on the Dutch painter Vermeer. Bredius made his name by spotting fake paintings wrongly attributed to Vermeer. In 1937, he was shown a large canvas, on a 17th-century wooden frame, which featured a painting of Christ at Emmaus and included Vermeer’s signature in the top left-hand corner. After studying the canvas he declared it, “Quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer.” This was despite a lot of clues to the contrary. The picture featured rather static images and clumsy details in comparison to Vermeer's other paintings, which should have told the expert it was a fake – which is was. Why was the expert so easily duped?
“A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one. ”
WHY?
Expertise opens up new traps that can be fallen into; traps that simply aren’t uncovered for novices. Bredius was an expert who knew more about his chosen subject than most of us will ever know about anything. However, he was still led astray by a few things. Firstly, it was his desire to find one more Vermeer painting in his lifetime. Secondly, his knowledge that there was a gap in Vermeer’s painting career that this new painting could help explain. And finally - and most importantly, he noticed details about the forgery that a less skilled observer would have missed. He gave more weight to these details than he should have done. For instance, he was taken with the bright speckled detailing that might look clumsy to the non-expert eye, but fitted Bredius’ expert knowledge of the highlighting techniques Vermeer used in previous paintings. It was details like these that led him astray and he missed the glaring reason to believe it was a fake: the picture didn’t look like any other Vermeer had ever painted!
When we’re experts we can accidentally cherry pick from the information we see. What does this mean you should do differently when you have expertise in something?
Expect there will be pitfalls that open up. Rather than our expertise safeguarding us from error, it simply opens up new traps.
Take extra care not to cherry pick the bits of information that chime with your expertise. Don’t focus in on the details at the expense of the overall picture.
Seek out the competing or novice-eyed view.
Don’t dismiss the broader contextual information too soon.
There’s no fool proof way to never be led astray. However, if you find yourself cherry picking from the information available to you, it should at least help you to proceed with more caution and look beyond the cherries you've picked out - especially when you think you are the expert.