Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness?

Scientific American:

As soon as I saw the headline “Research sheds light on origins of greatness”, my interest was piqued. The article is referring to a new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science, so I immediately downloaded that paper and left the press release open to the side. I’m wary of press releases with these sorts of headlines so best to go right to the source. Scanning the paper, which is coauthored by David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz, I realize it’s a summary of research they’ve already conducted (some published, some not). As I read about their studies I noticed that not one of them actually looked at greatness.

In a nutshell, their impressive body of research shows that working memory —the ability to simultaneously hold information in memory while processing other information—is correlated with performance on different “complex tasks” in the laboratory, including remembering baseball information, Texas Hold’em poker performance (their manuscript on this topic is submitted for publication), memory for the movement of spaceships and baseball players, and piano sight-reading performance. What’s more, working memory performance is still correlated with these “complex tasks” even among individuals with high levels of specific experience and knowledge for the domain. Hambrick and Meinz conclude “although deliberate practice may well be necessary to reach a very high level of skill, it is not always sufficient.”

Read the whole story: Scientific American