Expert intuitions: How to model the decision strategies of airport customs officers?

•We examined the decision strategies of customs officers and a lay control group.•The officers' decisions were best described by a simple noncompensatory heuristic.•The decisions in the control group were best described by a compensatory strategy.•These differences were partly mediated by differences in subjective cue dispersion.

How does expertise impact the selection of decision strategies? We asked airport customs officers and a novice control group to decide which passengers (described on several cue dimensions) they would submit to a search. Additionally, participants estimated the validities of the different cues. Then we modeled the decisions using compensatory strategies, which integrate many cues, and a noncompensatory heuristic, which relies on one-reason decision making. The majority of the customs officers were best described by the noncompensatory heuristic, whereas the majority of the novices were best described by a compensatory strategy. We also found that the experts' subjective cue validity estimates showed a higher dispersion across the cues and that differences in cue dispersion partially mediated differences in strategy use between experts and novices. Our results suggest that experts often rely on one-reason decision making and that expert–novice differences in strategy selection may reflect a response to the internal representation of the environment.