Most people want to believe that if they work hard, and practice, practice, practice, they can be the next great musician, artist, sports star, math genius, or whatever other fill-in-the-blank talented person they aspire to be. A new article discounts that egalitarian view of success and claims that hard work alone may not lead to greatness.
In the latest installment of the nature-versus-nurture discussion, psychologists claim that practice only accounts for half the success of great performance. Certain tasks and abilities, however, are defined by genetics, they posit. You either have gifted genes, or you don’t. And, if you don’t, practice can only take you so far.
For the study, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers evaluated 57 piano players with varying levels of experience — from virtual beginners to virtuosos. Each pianist was asked to sight-read of piece of music he or she had never seen before. Scoring a point for the
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