A study on expert prediction of behavioral economics experiments finds that experts have only a slight advantage over non-experts, suggesting that a separate 'rationality' skill may be more important than specific expertise. Longer summary

This post discusses a study by DellaVigna & Pope on expert prediction of behavioral economics experiments. The study found that knowledgeable academics had only a slight advantage over random individuals in predicting experimental results. Prestigious academics did not outperform less prestigious ones, and field of expertise did not matter. The expert advantage was small and easily overwhelmed by wisdom of crowds effects. The author suggests that these results indicate that experts' expertise may not be helping them much in this context, and proposes that a separate 'rationality' skill, somewhat predicted by high IQ and scientific training but not identical to either, might explain the results. The post also discusses the implications of these findings for real-world issues like election predictions, noting important caveats about the nature of the predictive task in the study. Shorter summary