About 15 years ago, there was an article in Science about a study of expert witnesses in parole hearings. It found that psychiatrists did no better than chance at predicting whether a prisoner would be back, which did not surprise the author. What did surprise the author was that judges were perfectly aware of it, but followed the psychiatrists’s recommendations anyway.

The explanation was that the judges were also aware that they would do no better than chance. But by relying on the experts’s coin flip rather than their own, they shifted the blame to the experts.

There are uses for experts that do not require them to be expert.