Alla oleva perustuu Anders Ericssonin kirjaan Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Ericsson, Anders & Pool, Robert 2016)
– Harjoittelun määrä ja laatu ratkaisee pitkässä juoksussa kuinka taitava henkilöstä tulee (taidosta ja alasta riippumatta)
– “Luonnonlahjakkuus” (kuten korkea ÄO) auttaa kun taitoa opetellaan ensimmäisiä kertoja
– Tietyillä aloilla saattaa olla minimilahjakkuusraja, jotta voi kehittyä alansa huipuksi
– Havaitut korrelaatiot esim ÄO:n (yksi mittari “sisäsyntyiselle” lahjakkuudelle) ja tieteellisen menestyksen välillä voivat pääosin selittyä valintaefektillä – prosessit, joiden kautta porukkaa valikoituu tutkijapolulle suodattavat tietynlaiset ominaisuudet omaavia henkilöitä (mm. kannustus niille jotka oppiva nopeiten alussa, harjoittelun merkityksen vähättely, lasten erilaisista kulttuurillisista, ei biologisista, perhetaustoista seuraavat erilaiset motivationaaliset, kyvylliset, asenteelliset valmiudet) kuin sillä, että korkean ÄO:n taustalla olevat ominaisuudet mahdollistaisivat menestyksen tai taitavaksi tulemisen
“We do know— and this is important— that among those people who have practiced enough and have reached a certain level of skill in their chosen field, there is no evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best. Once you get to the top, it isn’t natural talent that makes the difference, at least not “talent” in the way it is usually understood as an innate ability to excel at a particular activity. ”
“This is the dark side of believing in innate talent. It can beget a tendency to assume that some people have a talent for something and others don’t and that you can tell the difference early on. If you believe that, you encourage and support the “talented” ones and discourage the rest, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy. It is human nature to want to put effort— time, money, teaching, encouragement, support— where it will do the most good and also to try to protect kids from disappointment. There is usually nothing nefarious going on here, but the results can be incredibly damaging. ”
“…studies done in adults have generally found adult chess players to have no better visuospatial abilities than normal non-chess-playing adults. Research has also shown that skilled adult chess players— even grandmasters— do not have systematically higher IQs than other adults with similar levels of education. Nor is there any correlation between the IQs of highly skilled chess players and their chess ratings. ”
“Recent studies of Go masters have found that their average IQ is, if anything, below average. Two separate studies of Korean Go experts found an average IQ of about 93, compared with control groups of non-Go-playing Koreans matched for age and sex, which had an average IQ around 100. While the numbers of Go masters in the two studies were small enough that the below-average IQs could have been just statistical flukes, it is clear that Go masters, on average, score no higher on IQ tests than people in the general population. ”
“Does a higher intelligence (that is, a higher IQ score) help one develop a better chess game or not? The researchers’ [Merim Bilalić and Peter McLeod of Oxford University and Fernand Gobet of Brunel University] plan was to do a study that took into account both intelligence and practice time. …
The amount of chess practice that the children had done was the biggest factor in explaining how well they played chess, with more practice being correlated with better scores on the various measures of chess skill. A smaller but still significant factor was intelligence, with higher IQ being related to better chess skills. Surprisingly, visuospatial intelligence wasn’t the most important factor, but rather memory and processing speed were. Looking at all their evidence, the researchers concluded that in children of this age, practice is the key factor in success, although innate intelligence (or IQ) still plays a role….
The picture changed dramatically, however, when the researchers looked at only the “elite” players in the group…
Among these twenty-three elite players the amount of practice was still the major factor determining their chess skills, but intelligence played no noticeable role. While the elite group did have a somewhat higher average IQ than the average IQ for the entire group of fifty-seven, the players in the elite group with lower IQs were, on average, slightly better players than those in the elite group with higher IQs.”
“The results from the chess study provide a crucial insight into the interplay between “talent” and practice in the development of various skills. While people with certain innate characteristics— IQ, in the case of the chess study— may have an advantage when first learning a skill, that advantage gets smaller over time, and eventually the amount and the quality of practice take on a much larger role in determining how skilled a person becomes. “