The Dark Side of Believing in Innate Talent

This is the last in my mini-series of excerpts from Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. After explaining that people vary in how quickly they pick something up, such that some people get good at things sooner than others, but that our natural assumption that the tendency will persist is incorrect (a fast start is just the beginning of the story - in fact, it's the end of the story that tells the tale), the author continues as follows.

"When people assume that talent plays a major, even determining, role in how accomplished a person can become, that assumption points one toward certain decisions and actions. If you assume that people who are not innately gifted are never going to be good at something, then the children who don't excel at something right away are encouraged to try something else. The clumsy ones are pushed away from sports, the ones who can't carry a tune right away are told they should try something other than music, and the ones who don't immediately get comfortable with numbers are told they are no good at math. And, no surprise, the predictions come true: the girl who was told to forget about sports never becomes any good at hitting a tennis ball or kicking a soccer ball; the boy who was told he was tone-deaf never learns to play a musical instrument or to sing well; and the children who were told they were no good at math grow up believing it. The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.

"On the flip side, of course, the children who get more attention and praise from their teachers and coaches and more support and encouragement from their parents do end up developing their abilities to a much greater degree than the ones who were told never to try -- thus convincing everyone that their initial appraisals were correct. Again, self-fulfilling.

"Malcolm Gladwell told a story in his book Outliers - a story that others had told before him, but it was Gladwell's telling that got the most attention - of how there are many more Canadian professional hockey players born in the months of January through March than born in October through December. Is there something magical about being born in these months that grants extra talent for hockey to babies lucky enough to be born then? No. What happens is that there is a cutoff for playing youth hockey in Canada - you must be a certain age by December 31 of the previous year - and the children born in the first three months of the year are the oldest players in each class of players. When children start playing hockey at around age four or five, the advantage that older kids can have over younger ones is striking. Kids with an age advantage of close to a year will generally be taller, heavier, and somewhat more coordinated and mentally mature, and they may have had one more hockey season to develop ther hockey skills, so they are likely to be better at hockey than the younger players in their age group.. But those age-related physical differences get smaller and smaller as the hockey players get older, and they have pretty much disappeared by the time the players reach adulthood. So the age-related advantage must have its roots in childhood, when the physical differences still exist.

"The obvious explanation for the age effect is that it starts with the coaches, who are searching for the most talented players, beginning at the very earliest ages. Coaches can't really tell how old the various child hockey players are: all they can see is who is doing better and thus, by inference, who appears to be more talented. Many coaches will tend to treat the more 'talented' players with more praise and better instruction and to give these players more opportunities to play in games. And these players will be viewed as more talented not just by the coach but also by the other players. Furthermore, these players might be more willing to practice more because they are told that they have the promise of playing at very high levels, even professionally. The results of all this are striking - and not just in hockey. For example, one study found that among thirteen-year-old soccer players, more than 90 percent of the ones who were nominated as the best had been born in the first six months of the year....

"Suppose for a moment that...children with a higher spatial intelligence can learn to do basic math more quickly than others. Recent research has shown that children who have had experience playing linear board games with counting steps before they start school will do better in math once they are in school. And there are likely many other ways that certain preschool experiences iwll held children perform better in math later on. Most teachers, however, are not familiar with this possibility, so when some kids 'get' math more quickly than others, they're generally assumed to be gifted at math while the others aren't. Then the 'gifted' ones get more encouragement, more training, and so on, and sure enough, after a year or so they're much better at math than the others, and this advantage propagates through the school years. Since there are a number of careers, like engineering or physics, that require math courses in college, the students who have been judged to have no talent for math find these careers closed to them. But if math works the same way as chess, then we have lost a whole collection of children who might eventually have become quite accomplished in these areas if only they hadn't been labeled as 'no good at math' in the very beginning.

"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. The best way to avoid this is to recognize the potential in all of us - and work to find ways to develop it."

Comments