> The Instructors Who Couldn't Save Their Own Lives
> In 1981 my wife, Helen, and I conducted a study of cardiopulmonary resuscitation tion (CPR) (Klein and Klein 1981). We prepared six videotapes of people performing forming CPR on a red-haired lifesaving dummy called Resusci-Annie. Five of the videotapes showed relative novices-people who had completed an eight-hour course on CPR. The sixth videotape showed a paramedic.
> We played these videotapes to three audiences: ten novices who had just finished an eight-hour CPR course, ten CPR instructors who were experienced teachers but had never performed CPR on an actual victim, and ten paramedics who had used CPR many times. The study called for the participants to make a series of judgments. The last one was perhaps the most interesting. We asked each participant to imagine that it was his or her own life on the line. They had to identify one of six people in the videotapes who they would want to do CPR on them.
> The paramedics recognized expertise when they saw it. Nine of the ten picked the actual paramedic. When asked why, they could not point to any one thing. It was the entire pattern of his behavior, the smoothness with which he worked, that they liked. He seemed to know what he was doing.
> The novices too generally chose the paramedic. He got five of their ten votes. The instructors did not do as well. The paramedic in the tape was not following the rules they taught so carefully to their students. He wasn't carefully measuring where to put his hands, for example. Only three of the instructors chose him to save their lives.
— Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions