Intuition and deliberation in elite expertise

It has long been recognized that expert decision making entails both fast, intuitive and slower, deliberative processes. The enduring debate has to do with their relative roles. Some theories attribute the growth of expertise to the replacement of deliberative processes by intuitive perceptual recognition processes. Time pressure should have minimal effects on expert performance if intuitive processes are the primary basis for expertise. Two studies on archival data from the world's strongest chess experts participating in high-stakes time-critical international matches with different time controls were conducted. Chess moves from 20 grandmasters and seven world chess champions were examined in Studies 1 and 2, respectively. Using a within-subject design, analysis of quantifiable performance measures in both speed (move time) and decision quality (blunder propensity) provided a strong demonstration of adverse time pressure effects. Experts did not deliberate only when time pressure was low. Importantly, elite chess players were highly strategic and adaptive in their deployment of time usage that allowed them to intuit when feasible and to deliberate when necessary. The present findings demonstrate the key role of deliberative processes even at the highest levels of expertise and are inconsistent with the assertion that intuitive processes are the primary basis for expertise. Discounting the deliberate component in expert decision making in theory and in practice could have far-reaching real-world consequences.