may merely indicate that people who are highly motivated in a given field will spend
more time practising in it and hence are more likely to become experts. Unfortunately,
correlational research designs cannot control adequately for possible intervening
variables such as motivation. As Starkes et al. (2001) concluded: “what is not determined
by this model, but is absolutely crucial, is the role that motivation plays in determining
who will put in the necessarily huge amounts of practice to become an expert” (p. 186).
Third, like many theories in psychology, Ericsson’s stage theory of expertise may be
criticised for ignoring important contextual and socioeconomic variables. In particular,
this theory lacks a precise analysis of the effects of different resource constraints (e.g.,
access to suitable training facilities or specialist instructors) on people’s progress through
the three postulated stages of expertise. In a similar vein, Ericsson has not addressed
adequately the impact of socioeconomic variables on the maintenance of deliberate
practice schedules. A fourth criticism is that Ericsson’s claims are difficult to falsify or
disprove empirically because it is hard to find a performance domain in which people
have managed to attain expertise without engaging in extensive practice (ibid.). Another
methodological issue in this regard is that Ericsson’s theory relies heavily on people’s
retrospective accounts of their practice schedules. As we have indicated in this and earlier
chapters, data obtained retrospectively are potentially contaminated by exaggerations,
memory biases and response sets. Finally, Ericsson has been criticised for his failure to
include control groups in his studies (Sternberg, 1999). Despite these criticisms, the
theory of deliberate practice has proved to be rich and insightful in helping researchers to
understand the nature and development of expertise in sport.
Evaluating research on expertise in sport: significance, problems and
new directionsResearch on expertise in athletes is important both for theoretical and practical reasons.
Theoretically, expertise is one of the few topics that bridge the gap between sport
psychology and mainstream cognitive psychology. Indeed, until the advent of research on
everyday cognition (see Woll, 2002), research on athletic expertise was seen as falling
between two stools in the sense that it was perceived as being too “physical” for
cognitive psychology and too “cognitive” for sport psychology (Starkes et al., 2001).
However, over the past decade, largely as a result of Ericsson’s research programme on
the relationship between practice and exceptional performance, athletic skills have begun
to attract the interest of researchers from cognitive psychology. Meanwhile, at a practical
level, research on athletic expertise is valuable because it has highlighted the need for
greater understanding of the practice habits of sport performers of different levels of
ability (Starkes, 2001). In addition, it has raised the intriguing practical question of
whether or not perceptual training programmes can accelerate the skills of novices so that
they can “hasten the journey” to expertise (ibid.). With regard to this issue, research
suggests that cognitive interventions designed to develop the knowledge-base underlying
expertise are probably more effective in facilitating elite performance than are perceptual
skills training programmes (see A.M.Williams, 2002b, 2003).
Despite its theoretical and practical significance, however, research on athletic
expertise is hampered by at least three conceptual and methodological problems (see
What lies beneath the surface? Investigating expertise in sport 179