Democrats prize experts in staffing the Executive Branch while Republicans prefer political operatives and media spokespersons. But across the issue spectrum, policies are increasingly complicated and technical, requiring knowledge of many previous rounds of institution-building and policymaking. New social problems require remixing of complex policy tools, often led by research and experts. Addressing climate change and public health, for example, requires professionalized expert workforces and technical analyses. Even seemingly value-based areas of policymaking such as economic development and racial discrimination increasingly require subject-matter experts and formalized training. And the issue of higher education itself has increasingly divided the parties. Chapter 6 documents how each policy area is increasingly dominated by complex proposals from liberals accompanied by conservative suspicion of expert-led governance. Policy knowledge and evaluation capacity have become increasingly tethered to the Democratic Party, with believably nonpartisan expertise now in short supply.

No-one can predict the future with accuracy. Yet doctors in all disciplines are required to make projections about the future and doctors are held to a level of expertise when exercising professional judgement within their scope of practice. The acquisition of expertise requires a knowledge of what expertise is in itself. Diagnosis is such a skill, demonstrating that unstructured professional judgement seldom exists in the absence of semi-structured or structured approaches to expert judgement. Risk has been taken as a paradigm for structured professional judgement. A thorough understanding of the nature of expertise in psychiatry and in the courts is necessary for the practice of forensic psychiatry. The process of both teaching and acquiring clinical expertise is considered both from first principles and in relation to topics such as the use of structured professional judgement instruments and judgement support frameworks. These extend to all aspects of practice including triage and needs assessment, leave, conditional discharge, treatment programme completion, forensic recovery, a range of functional mental capacities, legal defences and reliability.

The aims of this chapter are firstly to help trainees refine forensic assessments of offender patients so they can give advice to courts in determining an offender’s legal responsibility for a criminal act. Secondly, the chapter aims to help illuminate the motivation for violent offending and the pathways to violence. This is not only necessary for giving expert evidence in courts but is also essential in choosing the treatment that should be offered to a patient and the level of security required in which to deliver treatment. In some cases it may be relevant to the likelihood of a successful response to treatment. Thirdly, associations between criminal behaviour and mental disorder may be highly important in the assessment of risk of future offending. Finally, and most importantly, a good forensic assessment should concentrate on the future management and prevention of further violence. Although forensic psychiatrists should be experts in the assessment of violence among people with mental disorder, it is essential to develop expertise with those who have no evidence of mental disorder. Paradoxically, these cases are often the most challenging to understand and evaluate.

This chapter addresses how cognitive flexibility enables an individual to respond adaptively to new situations and respond appropriately to any situation. Interrupting automaticity avoids being trapped in mindsets that foreclose generating new options; avoiding reductive bias reduces the tendency to oversimplify and turn dynamic processes into fixed objects and make complex interactions linear; avoiding functional fixedness reduces the tendency to apply the same solution to different situations; and cognitive connectivity opens up to new approaches in which mental models can be transformed, schemata reorganized, and cognitive bridges built between previous expertise and new situations. This kind of cognitive flexibility enables individuals to respond and adapt to the new situation into which they are moving. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter presents a brief theoretical overview of intelligence, cognition, and expertise and their theoretical basis for use in the subsequent chapters. It introduces the main models of intelligence including trait and factorial models, the triarchic mind, and multiple intelligence theories. It then reviews the approach of cognitive psychology based upon early computer modelling of human cognition, schemas and frames, production systems, and episodic and semantic memory. Finally, it reviews expert systems, expert knowledge acquisition and retrieval, practice, transfer of skill, flexibility of knowledge retrieval, and how all of these factors influence the ability of an individual to make transitions in their careers.

This chapter presents an overview of the book and positions it in the context of the development of expertise and the pursuit of excellence. It presents the historical context of the development of expertise and the theoretical context of the study of expertise.

Transnational policy networks (TPNs) participate in global governance by formulating ideas and policy options around and through formal and informal intergovernmental organizations. They illustrate the third type of informal governance introduced in Chapter 1, informal governance that exists in the spaces around these institutions. TPNs are constituted by individuals who share a common expertise, a common technical language, and broadly shared normative concerns, but not a common institutional setting nor agreement on specific policy goals. This chapter contrasts TPNs with other institutional forms in the literature – advocacy networks, epistemic communities, transgovernmental networks, public–private partnerships, multistakeholder initiatives, and transgovernmental initiatives – and argues for their integrative advantages and ability to address individual agency and power. A heuristic case illustrates how a TPN functioned to create the Office of the Ombudsperson at the UN – securing rights protection for individuals targeted for UN sanctions – despite the initial opposition of all five Permanent Members of the Security Council. The chapter concludes with reflections on the potential benefits of applying the concept to other emergent policy domains.

Chapter 3 shows how Prime Minister Modi’s government oscillates between populist anti-elitism and forms of technocratic expertise to produce a distinct form of nationalism that is both seemingly pragmatic and extremely ethnocentric. It starts off by looking at how policy organisations channel dominant policy debates in certain directions, enable particular classifications of target groups, and legitimise certain policy solutions while marginalising others. In opposition to scholarship that sees technocracy and populism as contradictory forces (see Laclau 2005; Rosanvallon 2011), this chapter argues that they have emerged as two complementary arms of governance in contemporary India: (1) populist politics, which appeals to the masses/majority by defining nationalism through rigid boundaries of caste, class, and religion; and (2) technocratic policy, which produces a consensus of pragmatism and neutralises charges of hyper-nationalism. I emphasise the relational dynamic between the two: they function through different, often contradictory, logics and content, yet are able to work towards the same goals in key moments of mutual reinforcement.

The thinking and emotional brains work together to help lawyers develop expertise in a process called memory consolidation. Information enters the thinking brain through the senses, such as the eyes and ears, and travels to the memory-processing hippocampus. Newer memories are remembered from the network of brain cells that loop between the thinking brain and the hippocampus in the emotional brain. Stable memory, a lawyer’s hard-earned expertise, is recalled from the connectome, which is the unique architecture of neurons in the lawyer’s thinking brain.

Discussing serious news can be difficult and a skilled clinician can improve their patient’s care and feeling of being cared for. Communication is central to the effective medical practice, and the data shows that clinicians can learn to improve their skills. This book will focus on the broad domains of communication skills and cognitive roadmaps. Through personal reflection as well as honing communication skills and using roadmaps, clinicians can cultivate internal psychological capacities that lead to more skillful and authentic conversations. Our basic principles at VitalTalk are to start with the patient’s agenda, track emotional and cognitive data, stay at the patient’s pace, express empathy explicitly, discuss what can be done before the things that can’t, cover big picture goals before specific interventions, pay true attention, and ask for the patient’s take away. In addition to reading about serious illness communication, these skills are best learned through observation, practice, and feedback.

This chapter discusses the importance of collaborative relationships in civic life, and how the relationships that people would value do not always arise on their own. Instead, there can be an unmet desire to collaborate. It underscores why it’s important to distinguish between two types of goals for collaborative relationships: informal collaboration oriented toward knowledge exchange, and formal collaboration oriented toward projects with shared ownership, decision-making authority, and accountability. It also introduces the book’s main argument, which is that in addition to commonly cited factors such as resource constraints and a lack of organizational incentives, unmet desire arises because potential collaborators (who often begin as strangers) can be uncertain how to relate to each other. Uncertainty about relationality is a key barrier to new collaborative relationships. Last, the chapter also connects a rich understanding of the science of collaboration to several other topics: the nature of democratic agency, how to strengthen the link between science and society, the nature of discursive participation as a form of civic engagement, and how we conceptualize civic competence.

This chapter focuses on the expertise of forensic science practitioners who make legally relevant decisions from both a skills-based and vulnerabilities-based perspective. We bring together research relevant to forensic examiners’ decision-making to inform the development of empirically based solutions for some of the issues we raise. We begin by describing a general model of bias in judgment, explaining how experts can be vulnerable to systematic errors and biases in decision-making, but also how expertise can protect against bias in some circumstances. We then explore the cognitive mechanisms underpinning forensic science expertise to explore the unique abilities examiners develop, the important role of these unique abilities in forensic science decision-making, and their implications for selection and training. We describe what can be done now to enhance experts’ strengths and mitigate the negative effects of bias. Finally, we conclude by exploring how future research can continue to explore the unique abilities and vulnerabilities in forensic science decision-making to enhance professional performance.

This chapter examines individual, social, and environmental factors associated with judicial decisions in juvenile dependency and juvenile justice cases. The structure and process of juvenile justice decisions are described along with a brief comparison to the adult courts. Current models and recommended guidance on juvenile dependency and juvenile justice cases are explored. Factors reviewed include, but are not limited to, legal considerations (e.g., removal, reunification, transfer/waiver, pleas, and placements), judicial education and expertise (e.g., formal training and judicial stress), bias (e.g., racial and socioeconomic prejudice), parent and youth characteristics (e.g., age and gender), family dynamics (e.g., parental engagement, child and parent attachment, and exposure to substances use and abuse), trauma, hearing practice, and representation. The chapter synthesizes the body of current research, discusses limitations in the current juvenile dependency and juvenile justice literature, and provides recommendations for future directions in both basic and applied research as well as policy implications for the legal decision-making field.