Via Artsjournal.com, Scienceblog had short piece discussing the 10,000 hours to mastery claim that Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his book, Outliers.
Gladwell had based his claim on a 1993 study of violinists. In 2019 another group tried to replicate the study but didn’t achieve the same results. One of the differences in the 2019 study was that the designers didn’t tell those evaluating the violin performances how many hours the violinists had engaged in deliberate practice. They didn’t want to even unconsciously influence the perceptions of the evaluators.
What the 2019 study found was that those rated as providing the best performance quality had practiced fewer hours than those rated as providing a good performance. Those rated as least accomplished practiced least.
The result ran against the popular version of the rule. The “good” group had logged an average of 9,844 hours of deliberate practice; the “best” group averaged 8,224 hours, a difference that was not statistically significant (p = 0.364). The group rated merely good had practised more than the group rated best, not less.
They make the caveat that these results were achieved using a relatively small sample size with one musical instrument and may not reflect how skills develop in other fields of endeavor.
The point that make is that it is difficult to identify a specific set of factors which delineates the difference between best and good. The 10,000 hours provided a facile explanation to complex circumstances.
Gladwell’s framing had an obvious appeal: it turned talent into something within anyone’s control, a number to hit rather than a trait to be born with. That’s a more motivating story than “some mix of practice, teaching quality, feedback and factors nobody has fully mapped yet determines expertise,” even if the second version is closer to what the research, taken as a whole, actually supports.
