Is talent more determinant than work?
How do people become good at science, music or sports? Is it innate or acquired?
These questions have long been the subject of intense debate in psychology. And unlike some scholars who insist on the pivotal role of practice and work, David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz, two psychology professors, argue in a New York Times article that talent and intelligence have a much more impact on our actions.
The two researchers point out that less than 20 years ago, a pioneering study led by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson of the University of Florida showed that playing music was mostly about hours of practice. So he noticed with his colleagues that at the age of 20 years, the best students of the music department of the University of Florida had accumulated not less than 10.000 hours of rehearsal, against 8.000 for students deemed good but not excellent and 5.000 hours for the underperforming.
As David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz point out, these founding results have been followed by many "enthusiastic" studies in the same direction: what separates the best from the good is hard work and determination. . Malcolm Gladwell draws the same conclusion when he summarizes the importance of Ericsson's research in his book Outliers:
"Practice is not what you do once you are good, but what you do to become good."
In the same way, Geoff Colvin in his book The talent is overvalued, distinguishes precisely to measure the relevance of the IQ, the performance in a repeated and habitual frame and the realized performance only once:
"IQ is a good indicator of performance for an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been doing the same job for a few years, IQ does not predict much or nothing about performance. "
But according to the two authors of the New York Times article, these claims do not exactly correspond to "what science says." More recent research shows that intellectual abilities have a decisive role to succeed in many areas.
David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee have followed the academic paths of more than 2.000 people who have achieved the best scores at SAT at 13 years (the 1% the best). And they note that in comparison to the best 9%, the first 1% are three to five times more likely to have a doctorate, to write a book or to publish an article in a scientific journal.
The two authors also discuss their own findings, which are based on the analysis of what they call the "working memory" capability. According to them, this intellectual quality is innate. But it is she who makes the difference between, for example, two pianists with the same experience but not the same intelligence.
This article in the New York Times has been sharply criticized by Gizmodo, a site specializing in the news of technological innovations. The site deplores the fact that the two psychologists seek to discourage all those who try to undertake "working really hard", and stresses that the notion of "talent" is not limited to genetics, and therefore to the innate.
Source: http://www.slate.fr/lien/46641/talent-d ... e-reussite