a few children are subjected to these kinds of situations, but such a concession
is not a sufficient justification to disregard the larger hazards of false talent
attributions. It is worth considering the heavy dependence of domains like
classical music or chess on the continuation of amateur participants, general
social approval from nonparticipants, and their associated financial contri-
butions (grants, sponsorships, endowments, donations, subscriptions, ticket
sales, etc.). When one couples the need for participation by the vast number
of potentially untalented individuals with the admission by Winner and other
talent researchers (Feldman, 1986; Winner & Martino, 1993) that most intel-
lectual and creative prodigies (i.e., the individuals who are often given the
most attention and resources) do not usually make outstanding contributions
to their fields as adults, it seems fairly obvious that the dominant philoso-
phies and procedures for the identification and development of talent need to
be closely reexamined. In short, if existing policies and attitudes regarding the
nature of exceptional abilities are contributing to inappropriate levels and
forms of social and educational selection, we may be inadvertently alienating
large segments of the population that are critical to the very survival of these
domains.
SUMMARY
We have reviewed relevant literature on motivation, personality, and emo-
tion in the domains of chess and music performance. The literature shows
that there are significant bivariate relationships in directions consistent with
the view that motivational factors are important determinants of practice.
Nonetheless, it is worth noting that such variables typically play weak roles (r
values < .3, meaning less than 10% of the variance) in predicting either the ex-
tent of practice or its end state: current skill level. Such relations are quite
modest compared to those found in Charness et al. (1996), where 60% of the
variance in current level of chess expertise could be accounted for by factors
such as cumulative deliberate practice, age (negatively, for older adults), and
size of chess library. However, the latter variables lie somewhat closer to the
mechanisms that are hypothesized to be directly responsible for skilled per-
formance in the framework depicted in Fig. 11.1.
It is also worth noting that the two domains highlighted by our review
probably played little or no role in our species’ early evolutionary history.
Rather than postulate domain-specific abilities, motivations, and personali-
ties that were honed by millennia of evolutionary pressures, a more modest
view might be that evolutionary pressures molded humans into general learn-
ing machines that can often be directed (via our social nature) into the many
highly specialized roles that both ancient societies required and that modern
314 CHARNESS, TUFFIASH, JASTRZEMBSKI