ABSTRACT
It has often been said, almost to the extent of having become a cliché, that expertise in a given domain actually hinders people’s success in that domain. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (1970), for instance, claimed that younger or less experienced scientists have a far better chance of coming up with a revolutionary discovery than have older scientists (see also Simonton, 1984):
Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them. (p. 90)
