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What makes someone rise to the top in music, games, sports, business, or science? This question is the subject of one of psychology’s oldest debates. In the late 1800s, Francis Galton—founder of the scientific study of intelligence and a cousin of Charles Darwin—analyzed the genealogical records of hundreds of scholars, artists, musicians, and other professionals and found that greatness tends to run in families. For example, he counted more than 20 eminent musicians in the Bach family. (Johann Sebastian was just the most famous.) Galton concluded that experts are “born.” Nearly half a century later, the behaviorist John Watson countered that experts are “made” when he famously guaranteed that he could take any infant at random and “train him to become any type of specialist [he] might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents.”
The experts-are-made view has dominated the discussion in recent decades. To test this idea, Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues recruited violinists from an elite Berlin music academy and asked them to estimate the amount of time per week they had devoted to deliberate practice for each year of their musical careers. Based on these findings, Ericsson and colleagues argued that prolonged effort, not innate talent, explained differences between experts and novices. These findings filtered their way into pop culture. They were the inspiration for what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “10,000 Hour Rule” ( http://gladwell.com/outliers/the-10000-hour-rule/ ) in his book Outliers.
However, recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17201516 ) to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.
In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.
[Related Abstract]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=(Macnamara+and+Hambrick)
(Score: 1) by Lazarus on Monday September 29 2014, @07:25PM
>Nature AND Nurture both play a role.
Yep, and this is obvious to those of us with natural talent in a particular area. I can easily pick up programming languages, and most of the time software or mechanical problem-solving is effortless, but I'm terrible at learning to play music or learning spoken languages. I'm sure I could gain ground in those areas, but it's a struggle, and natural talent in some areas has caused me to never learn to struggle to gain skills that are more difficult for me to learn.
(Score: 1) by lizardloop on Tuesday September 30 2014, @11:48AM
Exactly the same situation here. I can pick up different programming languages with ease. But despite having spent most of my life trying to play different musical instruments I am just utterly useless at it. The final straw was when I bought a keyboard and started trying to learn to play that. After a week of hard practice I could hardly play anything. A musically talented friend of mine sat down at it and within 10 minutes was competently playing the theme tunes to many popular TV shows purely from memory. At that point I realised I was never going to be any good at it and decided to stop the music practice and just stick to what I'm good at... hacking out code.