Audience Decision-Making Expertise 21information is relevant and which is irrelevant, code information, organize it in memory, direct
the retrieval of information from memory, and specify which important information is missing.^128
Voters’ schemata can affect their attention to, interpretation, and recall of political information.^129
The schemata of experienced voters lead them to give attention to and to seek information about
political events that inexperienced voters tend to overlook.^130 The infl uence of schemata can even
be retroactive. An audience member’s current schema can help them retrieve memories that were
formed before the schema had been acquired.^131
Well-developed schemata provide many advantages for expert audience members. For example,voters with more highly developed political schemata are able to produce higher quality argu-
ments about current issues than less sophisticated voters.^132 The ability of experienced physicians
to recognize the signifi cance of secondary physiological measurements^133 can be credited to their
more complete schemata.^134 Schemata help experienced consumers recall product information,
make accurate inferences about the product information with which they are presented, and put
new information into context quickly.^135 Internal knowledge structures, or schemata, allow expert
business appraisers to quickly search for and assess the information they need to evaluate the worth
of a company.^136
Limitations of Decision Schemata
The schemata of expert audiences sometimes have negative effects on the decisions they make. When
activated, an expert’s schemata may lead the expert to distort new information that is inconsistent with
their schemata.^137 An expert’s schemata may also lead them to discount schema-inconsistent
information altogether.^138 In addition, an expert’s schemata can limit the types of problems
they perceive. For example, business executives have been found to defi ne problems largely in
terms of their functional expertise, such as marketing, fi nance, or operations, and not recognize
FIGURE 1.1 Decision Makers Spontaneously Create Decision Matrices
Source: Coupey (1994, p. 90)