societies demand. We have reviewed some of the general internal and external
influences that may guide such processes. However, we also need to take a
more integrated perspective on skill development, and the evidence would
seem to indicate that motivational and affective forces may act as important
filters that stream people toward one domain or another, and perhaps make
it more or less likely that they will experience and respond to internal and ex-
ternal reward mechanisms in a manner that fosters the development of excep-
tional performance.
Like many psychological inquiries, our exploration of the motivational
factors involved in expert performance has led to more questions than it has
resolved. Hence, in closing we wish to stress the need for further systematic
explorations of the relevant variables related to motivation and expert skill
acquisition. Although we have focused on chess and music performance,
there may be particular advantages to using other domains. A promising one
is sports, in that skill levels as measured by win–loss ratios or other measures
of the probability of success (i.e., batting averages in baseball, handicap in
golf ) are undoubtedly more objective and easier to obtain than judgments of
skill in music and other artistic or intellectual disciplines. We certainly favor
longitudinal studies as the best, though most expensive method to trace the
development of expertise.
As one example, for a longitudinal study of chess skill acquisition, partic-
ipants could be tested initially to ascertain individual differences in the
kinds of intrapersonal variables reviewed earlier (expectations and values,
self-efficacy and skill attributions, personality traits and goal orientations)
along with interpersonal variables (parental, peer, and teacher influences,
organizational and material resources) as well as some type of psychometric
battery of perceptual and cognitive tasks to examine the predictive value of
traditional intelligence-related constructs (mental speed, working memory,
deductive reasoning). The sample could then be reinterviewed and retested
over a long enough interval, perhaps 10 years, on the previous variables,
along with representative tasks from the domain of interest, over the subse-
quent decade. In addition to providing a fairly strong empirical test of the
oft-cited 10-year rule for the attainment of expertise (e.g., Simon & Chase,
1973), such a study would significantly advance our understanding of the
interrelations of the factors outlined in our framework, and in particular,
changes in the roles of personality and motivation in skill acquisition over
extended periods of time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Aging
(5R01 AG13969) to Neil Charness.
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