Knowledge that Transforms

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Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis

Brooke N. Macnamara; David Z. Hambrick; Frederick L. Oswald
Psychological Science 2014 25(8), 1608-1618
More than 20 years ago, researchers proposed that individual differences in performance in such domains as music, sports, and games largely reflect individual differences in amount of deliberate practice, which was defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain. This view is a frequent topic of popular-science writing—but is it supported by empirical evidence? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis covering all major domains in which deliberate practice has been investigated. We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.

Neural Predictors of Giving in to Temptation in Daily Life

Richard B. Lopez; Wilhelm Hofmann; Dylan D. Wagner; William M. Kelley; Todd F. Heatherton
Psychological Science 2014 25(7), 1337-1344
The ability to control desires, whether for food, sex, or drugs, enables people to function successfully within society. Yet, in tempting situations, strong impulses often result in self-control failure. Although many triggers of self-control failure have been identified, the question remains as to why some individuals are more likely than others to give in to temptation. In this study, we combined functional neuroimaging and experience sampling to determine if there are brain markers that predict whether people act on their food desires in daily life. We examined food-cue-related activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), as well as activity associated with response inhibition in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Greater NAcc activity was associated with greater likelihood of self-control failures, whereas IFG activity supported successful resistance to temptations. These findings demonstrate an important role for the neural mechanisms underlying desire and self-control in people’s real-world experiences of temptations.

The Ontogeny of the Motivation That Underlies In-Group Bias

David Buttelmann; Robert Böhm
Psychological Science 2014 25(4), 921-927
Humans demonstrate a clear bias toward members of their own group over members of other groups in a variety of ways. It has been argued that the motivation underlying this in-group bias in adults may be favoritism toward one’s own group (in-group love), derogation of the out-group (out-group hate), or both. Although some studies have demonstrated in-group bias among children and infants, nothing is known about the underlying motivations of this bias. Using a novel game, we found that in-group love is already present in children of preschool age and can motivate in-group-biased behavior across childhood. In contrast, out-group hate develops only after a child’s sixth birthday and is a sufficient motivation for in-group-biased behavior from school age onward. These results help to better identify the motivation that underlies in-group-biased behavior in children.

The Too-Much-Talent Effect: Team Interdependence Determines When More Talent Is Too Much or Not Enough

Roderick I. Swaab; Michael Schaerer; Eric M. Anicich; Richard Ronay; Adam D. Galinsky
Psychological Science 2014 25(8), 1581-1591
Five studies examined the relationship between talent and team performance. Two survey studies found that people believe there is a linear and nearly monotonic relationship between talent and performance: Participants expected that more talent improves performance and that this relationship never turns negative. However, building off research on status conflicts, we predicted that talent facilitates performance—but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent decrease and eventually become detrimental as intrateam coordination suffers. We also predicted that the level of task interdependence is a key determinant of when more talent is detrimental rather than beneficial. Three archival studies revealed that the too-much-talent effect emerged when team members were interdependent (football and basketball) but not independent (baseball). Our basketball analysis also established the mediating role of team coordination. When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart.

Cultural Relativity in Perceiving Emotion From Vocalizations

Maria Gendron; Debi Roberson; Jacoba Marieta van der Vyver; Lisa Feldman Barrett
Psychological Science 2014 25(4), 911-920
A central question in the study of human behavior is whether certain emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, are recognized in nonverbal cues across cultures. We predicted and found that in a concept-free experimental task, participants from an isolated cultural context (the Himba ethnic group from northwestern Namibia) did not freely label Western vocalizations with expected emotion terms. Responses indicate that Himba participants perceived more basic affective properties of valence (positivity or negativity) and to some extent arousal (high or low activation). In a second, concept-embedded task, we manipulated whether the target and foil on a given trial matched in both valence and arousal, neither valence nor arousal, valence only, or arousal only. Himba participants achieved above-chance accuracy only when foils differed from targets in valence only. Our results indicate that the voice can reliably convey affective meaning across cultures, but that perceptions of emotion from the voice are culturally variable.

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard

Pam A. Mueller; Daniel M. Oppenheimer
Psychological Science 2014 25(6), 1159-1168
Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.

What Types of Terms Do People Use When Describing an Individual’s Personality?

Daniel Leising; Joachim Scharloth; Oliver Lohse; Dustin Wood
Psychological Science 2014 25(9), 1787-1794
An important yet untested assumption within personality psychology is that more important person characteristics are more densely reflected in language. We investigated how ratings of importance and other term properties are associated with one another and with a term’s frequency of use. Research participants were asked to provide terms that described individuals they knew, which resulted in a set of 624 adjectives. These terms were independently rated for importance, social desirability, observability, stateness versus traitness, level of abstraction, and base rate. Terms rated as describing more important person characteristics were in fact used more often by the participants in the sample and in a large corpus of online communications (close to 500 million words). More frequently used terms and more positive terms were also rated as being more abstract, more traitlike, and more widely applicable (i.e., having a greater base rate). We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to person perception in general.

Heralding the Authoritarian? Orientation Toward Authority in Early Childhood

Michal Reifen Tagar; Christopher M. Federico; Kristen E. Lyons; Steven Ludeke; Melissa A. Koenig
Psychological Science 2014 25(4), 883-892
In the research reported here, we examined whether individual differences in authoritarianism have expressions in early childhood. We expected that young children would be more responsive to cues of deviance and status to the extent that their parents endorsed authoritarian values. Using a sample of 43 preschoolers and their parents, we found support for both expectations. Children of parents high in authoritarianism trusted adults who adhered to convention (vs. adults who did not) more than did children of parents low in authoritarianism. Furthermore, compared with children of parents low in authoritarianism, children of parents high in authoritarianism gave greater weight to a status-based “adult = reliable” heuristic in trusting an ambiguously conventional adult. Findings were consistent using two different measures of parents’ authoritarian values. These findings demonstrate that children’s trust-related behaviors vary reliably with their parents’ orientations toward authority and convention, and suggest that individual differences in authoritarianism express themselves well before early adulthood.

Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation

Andrew C. Hafenbrack; Zoe Kinias; Sigal G. Barsade
Psychological Science 2014 25(2), 369-376
In the research reported here, we investigated the debiasing effect of mindfulness meditation on the sunk-cost bias. We conducted four studies (one correlational and three experimental); the results suggest that increased mindfulness reduces the tendency to allow unrecoverable prior costs to influence current decisions. Study 1 served as an initial correlational demonstration of the positive relationship between trait mindfulness and resistance to the sunk-cost bias. Studies 2a and 2b were laboratory experiments examining the effect of a mindfulness-meditation induction on increased resistance to the sunk-cost bias. In Study 3, we examined the mediating mechanisms of temporal focus and negative affect, and we found that the sunk-cost bias was attenuated by drawing one’s temporal focus away from the future and past and by reducing state negative affect, both of which were accomplished through mindfulness meditation.

Replicability and Robustness of Genome-Wide-Association Studies for Behavioral Traits

Cornelius A. Rietveld; Dalton Conley; Nicholas Eriksson; Tõnu Esko; Sarah E. Medland; Anna A. E. Vinkhuyzen; Jian Yang; Jason D. Boardman; Christopher F. Chabris; Christopher T. Dawes; Benjamin W. Domingue; David A. Hinds; Magnus Johannesson; Amy K. Kiefer; David Laibson; Patrik K. E. Magnusson; Joanna L. Mountain; Sven Oskarsson; Olga Rostapshova; Alexander Teumer; Joyce Y. Tung; Peter M. Visscher; Daniel J. Benjamin; David Cesarini; Philipp D. Koellinger; the Social Science Genetics Association Consortium; N. Eriksson; D. A. Hinds; A. K. Kiefer; J. L. Mountain; J. Y. Tung; S. E. Medland; A. A. E. Vinkhuyzen; J. Yang; P. M. Visscher; D. Conley; J. D. Boardman; C. T. Dawes; B. W. Domingue; C. A. Rietveld; D. J. Benjamin; D. Cesarini; P. D. Koellinger; D. Conley; N. Eriksson; T. Esko; C. F. Chabris; M. Johannesson; D. Laibson; P. K. E. Magnusson; S. Oskarsson; O. Rostapshova; A. Teumer; P. M. Visscher; D. J. Benjamin; D. Cesarini; P. D. Koellinger
Psychological Science 2014 25(11), 1975-1986
A recent genome-wide-association study of educational attainment identified three single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) whose associations, despite their small effect sizes (each R 2 ≈ 0.02%), reached genome-wide significance ( p < 5 × 10 −8 ) in a large discovery sample and were replicated in an independent sample ( p < .05). The study also reported associations between educational attainment and indices of SNPs called “polygenic scores.” In three studies, we evaluated the robustness of these findings. Study 1 showed that the associations with all three SNPs were replicated in another large ( N = 34,428) independent sample. We also found that the scores remained predictive ( R 2 ≈ 2%) in regressions with stringent controls for stratification (Study 2) and in new within-family analyses (Study 3). Our results show that large and therefore well-powered genome-wide-association studies can identify replicable genetic associations with behavioral traits. The small effect sizes of individual SNPs are likely to be a major contributing factor explaining the striking contrast between our results and the disappointing replication record of most candidate-gene studies.