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3 - Expertise, Talent, and Social Encouragement

from PART I - INTRODUCTION AND PERSPECTIVE

By
Earl Hunt
Edited by
K. Anders Ericsson ,
Neil Charness ,
Paul J. Feltovich  and
Robert R. Hoffman
Earl Hunt
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Washington
K. Anders Ericsson
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Neil Charness
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Paul J. Feltovich
Affiliation:
University of West Florida
Robert R. Hoffman
Affiliation:
University of West Florida
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Summary

Introduction

There have literally been volumes of studies of expertise (Chi, Glaser, & Farr, 1988; Ericsson, 1996; Ericsson & Smith, 1991; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2001). The fields covered range from medicine to amateur wrestling. In spite of this diversity, regular themes emerge.

Experts know a lot about their field of expertise. This is hardly surprising; an ignorant expert would be an oxymoron. Experts work at becoming experts. The revealed wisdom is that this takes at least ten years (Richman et al., 1996). In some fields the time is spent perfecting the minutiae rather than in the fun of solving problems or winning games. Amateur musicians spend a great deal of time playing pieces, whereas professional musicians spend a great deal of time practicing sequences of movements (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). Chess masters do not just play a lot of chess, they read a lot of the chess literature.

Because practice is so important, some psychologists have minimized the contribution of talents developed before starting on the path to expertise (Ericsson et al., 1993; Sloboda, 1996). This position is consistent with well-established laboratory findings showing that under certain circumstances extended practice can lead to improvements in performance by an order of magnitude, along with a huge reduction in the range of interindividual differences (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977).

In this chapter I explore the relation between studies of expertise and a few selected results from different areas of psychology and economics.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance , pp. 31 - 38
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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