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On innate talent

By Scott Barry Kaufman on June 07, 2008 in Beautiful Minds

Given intense commitment and practice, is anyone capable of anything, regardless of innate endowment?

On this matter, John B. Watson, a founder of Behaviorism, once said:

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

Even among modern day researchers, there are traces of this idea. The prominent expertise researcher K. Anders Ericsson believes that, with the exception of fixed genetic factors determining body size and height, there are no innate constraints to the attainment of elite achievement for healthy individuals. According to Ericsson, the key determinant is not innate talent, but what he refers to as "deliberate practice". Practice that is focused, productive, goal directed and where you can receive constant feedback.

This is actually quite a different view from the earliest ability researchers such as Francis Galton and Lewis Terman, who emphasized the hereditary basis of talent.

I was so interested in this idea, that in high school I tried a little experiment of my own.

Kobe Bryant

I decided I was going to deliberately practice my way into the NBA and the Philadelphia Orchestra. As for the NBA, I already had an advantage. No, I wasn't seven feet tall, but I luckily I had a good model--a young chap by the name of Kobe Bryant. Yes, that's right; I roamed the halls of Middle School and High School with Kobe Bryant. With my friend Avi, we would hit the courts every day after school and play pick up with the extraordinarily precocious 16 year old Kobe. I once almost beat him in a game of PIG in gym class-- until he decided to break the rules and dunk the ball. Even though I gave it my all, when I went to try-outs I did not make the team. Yes, that hurt.

Harry Gorodetzer

As for my Philadelphia Orchestra dreams, things fared better for me. I started to take cello lessons with my Grandfather, Harry Gorodetzer, who was associate principle cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra for 50 years (the record). After a month of daily lessons with gramps, I had joined my high school orchestra. I even beat the lowest cellist at the first seating auditions, an individual who had been playing for at least 5 years.

While I put in the same amount of intense practice in both basketball and cello, I struggled to stand out in basketball (don't get me wrong, I wasn't bad!), and learned cello with an ease that shocked everyone around me, including myself.

From these two experiences, I became convinced that people really do have certain proclivities, and while deliberate practice certainly matters, genes facilitate the rate of learning to a considerable degree.

In my last post, I described various conceptualizations of giftedness. These conceptualizations treated "gifts" as static, as though people are born with gifts. In reality, people are born with "proclivities". In fact, the field of gifted education is moving toward a developmental model of giftedness, in which the emphasis is on the constantly changing nature of gifts, and the external factors that might interact with the internal factors of the individual to produce gifted behavior.

Julian Stanley, founder of the Study of Mathematically Precious Youth (SMPY) at Johns Hopkins University chooses not to even use the word "gifted", and refers to children who display certain proclivities as "precocious". Stanley's legacy lives on--today, approximately 85,000 second through eight graders throughout the world participate in his talent-search program annually. Stanley believes in finding children who are precocious, and helping them to accelerate their education.

DMGT Model of Giftedness Additionally, Françoys Gagné has noted that it is unfortunate that the field has used the words "gifted" and "talented" interchangeably. Instead, in his Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent (DMGT) model, he aims to uncover the important environmental influences (home, school, parents, activities, encounters, etc.), nonintellective variables (motivation, temperament), and learning, training, and practicing, that transform basic, genetically influenced "gifts" (intellectual, creative, sensorimotor, etc.) into specific talents (language, science, mathematics, art, music, leadership, etc.) in everyday life.

Other heavyweights in the field such as Franz Mönks, Abraham Tannenbaum, David Henry Feldman, and John Feldhusen have similar models of giftedness that emphasize the developmental nature of talents and the interaction of genetic proclivities with factors external to the individual.

Therefore, the emerging goal of gifted education researchers is to help students convert potential to achievement. Every student has a range as to what they can achieve; the key is for educators to help students reach their upper limit, and make sure there aren't environmental factors that are hindering a student from doing so.

Kobe Bryant has a larger range than me in Basketball, and I can deal with that (although I would like a rematch in PIG-- no dunking this time, big guy). I would however like to see him write a Psychology Today blog entry as well as he can make a layup. Come on Kobe, I challenge you.

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If you are interested in reading more on the debate about innate talent, I highly recommend you read Ericsson and his colleagues' recent target article in the journal High Ability Studies as well as commentary by me and my colleagues, and response to the commentaries.

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Marcel Proust's perspective

Submitted by Douglas Eby on June 8, 2008 - 2:47pm.

Marcel Proust had an intriguing perspective on this: "But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them....

"Those who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected." [From In Search of Lost Time.]

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Not Everything but Anything, Maybe

Submitted by Shamrock on June 17, 2008 - 11:03am.

What's your take on people who do seem capable of quite anthing? (Not everything, but just about anything, maybe.)

I never considered talent innate because mediocrity with dilligence can transform into above average skill.

I'm not saying that any baller can be Kobe Bryant, but perhaps any non-athlete can make a great baller with the will and practice to become so. For instance, I've always told people who laud how talented I am that my one talent is the ability to quickly learn anything that I set my mind to. I wanted to be a poet, I'm a fairly decent poet (per audiences throughout my state and others who have read my books). I wanted to be a songwriter, I'm a pretty great songwriter. I wanted to write fiction, when I get the bite to write, I'm pretty good. Never the athlete, when I decided I wanted to run track in high school, I worked at it with a great coach and went on to routinely place 2nd or 3rd in any race I competed in. Not saying that willpower makes one brilliant. But certainly, I'm not an innate track runner, poet, songwriter, story teller, dancer, singer, painter, etc.

I do happen to believe that when it comes to this, conceptualizing what we're capable of in terms of innate and learned may in many ways limit us. Perhaps you were a gifted instrumentalist because you knew of your family connection to music and conceptualised your talent as innate, thus motivating you to pursue it more dilligently. In the same way, had your relative been a ballplayer, might you have expounded upon your basketball abilities?

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Response to Shamrock

Submitted by Scott Barry Kaufman on July 21, 2008 - 4:09pm.

Thank you for your reflective post Shamrock. As you know, I am deeply interested in these questions. There are no final answers, but recent research by myself and others that I will be covering in future posts are starting to give us some hints.

Some giftedness researchers would say that those who seem capable of learning quite anything can do so as a result of their high IQ.

I do believe that domain general learning mechanisms play an important role in learning anything and everything. To the extent that individual differences in these mechanisms are at least partially heritable, then there will be a genetic correlation in the general population between these learning mechanisms and performance.

I have a friend who has an IQ above 180 and she can soak up knowledge like a sponge. She has taught herself many things such as Latin and Physics. I suspect that you also have a reasonably high IQ.

Keep in mind though that domain general learning mechanisms influence the rate of learning. Surely, anyone can practice and will improve as a result of that practice. What needs explanation is when you match two people in terms of the amount and quality of practice, and one seems to learn at a rate faster than the other-- and this difference is much greater than is predicted by chance. This to me is a fascinating question, and deserves scientific explanation and study.

Motivation and enironment surely are important. The interesting scientific question for me is the relative contribution of all of these important factors to elite performance. Another interesting question is the domain specificity of creativity, and the difference in the relative contribution of these factors across domains.

It sounds like you also are interested in these questions. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading my blog.

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Scott Barry Kaufman has published multiple journal articles and book chapters relating to intelligence and creativity and is the editor of two forthcoming books.