Expert Power
The Basic Idea
Why are experts able to easily influence others in their field of study or workplace?
Think of how our mathematics professor influences the way we approach specific problems. When the professor shows us their preferred method, we adopt and follow the steps without a second thought. In the workplace, we find ourselves intuitively following the instructions of our managers, who have presumably climbed the ranks due to their superior knowledge.
Our professors’ and managers’ expertise enables them to exert expert power: a social power that refers to an individual’s ability to influence people, as a result of the influencer being perceived by others to be a highly skilled expert. Expertise can be demonstrated by superior credentials, reputation, experience, niche skills, or a higher level of knowledge.1
Expertise does not have to be genuine for one to use expert power. As long as others perceive an individual to be an expert, the influencer can benefit from others believing they are experts.
We tend to listen, trust, and respect the opinions of individuals with expert power. They are perceived to have valuable ideas and effective leadership skills, enabling them to exert their influence on others.2
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
– Niels Bohr, Danish physicist
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
